French New Wave

         The French New Wave is widely regarded as one of the most influential movements ever to take place in cinema back in mid-1950s. The effects of the new wave have been felt since its birth as a movement long after it faded away. It was a motion against the traditional French cinema, which was more literature than cinema. One of the movie “la politique des auteur”, using jump cuts and the unimportance of linear structure make the movie become even more awesome back in time. Most importantly, it gave a radical sense of change in cinema that would trickle throughout the world. 

         The effects of the new wave movement are far and wide. The films that sprung out of it gained international fame and young filmmakers around the world had grown up watching them. The most recent filmmaker to show an extensive study and use of new wave techniques has been Quentin Tarantino (Roberts and Wallis 97). Tarantino is not shy in sharing his opinions about his favorite director, Godard, and the influence the new wave has had on his movies. It can be said that pulp fiction was made in tribute to such Godard films as A bout de Souffle. Tarantino even named his production company “A Band Apart” after the Godard film of similar name.

The movies that we choose

For the movie, The 400 Blows is directed by François Truffaut. The film is about bastard child Antoine, as his youthful exuberance is slowly drained from him by his desolate life. The reason why Zico picked this movie because The 400 Blows was one of the best French New Wave movies that had made. It reflected the reality inside the lives of the people living in Paris.

 Next, the director of Paris Belongs to Us is Jacques Rivette. The film is about Anne Goupil, a literature student in Paris, 1957. Her elder brother, Pierre, takes her to a party where the guests include Philip Kaufman, an expatriate American escaping McCarthyism, and Gerard Lenz, a theatre director who arrives with the mysterious woman Terry. The talk at the party is about the apparent suicide of their friend Juan, a Spanish activist who had recently broken up with Terry. Philip warns Anne that the forces that killed Juan will soon do the same to Gerard. Gerard is trying to rehearse Shakespeare's "Pericles", although he has no financial backing. Anne takes a part in the play to help Gerard, and to try to discover why Juan died. The reason why Hui Bin chose this movie is because it is Rivette's first full-length film as a director, one of the first works of the French New Wave and one of the best French New Wave movies. Besides, it reflects youthful rebellion, social criticism, and human relationships among the characters in the movie.

            The following movie is Jules and Jim and it is directed by Francois Truffaut. In Paris, before World War 2, two friends, Jules (Australian) and Jim (French) fall in love with the same woman, Catherine. But Catherine loves and marries Jules. After the war, when they meet again in Germany, Catherine starts to love Jim. This is the story of three people in love, a love which does not affect their friendship, and about how their relationship evolves with the years. The reason why Yi Lin selects this movie is because this movie is talking about human relationship like the others French New Wave movies. It is very interesting that actually 2 good friends and involves in love but it doesn’t affect their relationship.

            The fourth movie is Le Samouraï that choosen by Jia Jun. Jean-Pierre Melville is the director of this movie. The movie is about a perfectionist, Jef Costello who always carefully plans his murders and who never gets caught. However, there was one night after killing a night-club owner, he’s seen by withnesses. His efforts to provide himself with am alibi fail and more and more he gets driven into a corner. The reason why he chooses this movie is he likes to watch any movie about samurai so he can know aboout what is the style of French New Wave movie that related to samurai.

            Lastly, Justin selects Breathless as the movie that he wants to analyze. This movie is direct by Jean-Luc Godard. This movie is about an irresponsible sociopath and small-time thief, steals a car and impulsively murders the motorcycle policeman who pursues him. Now wanted by the authorities, he renews his relationship with Patricia Franchini, a hip American girl studying journalism at the Sorbonne, whom he had met in Nice a few weeks earlier. Before leaving Paris, he plans to collect a debt from an underworld acquaintance and expects her to accompany him on his planned getaway to Italy. Even with his face in the local papers and media, Poiccard seems oblivious to the dragnet that is slowly closing around him as he recklessly pursues his love of American movies and libidinous interest in the beautiful American.

Breathless 1960 (A bout de Souffle)

Jean-Luc Godard intended his debut film, which was inspired by a newspaper item about a young thug who killed a policeman and hid out with his girlfriend, who later betrayed him. It became the most influential film of the New Wave, an existential masterpiece. In the movie, Godard broke all the rules, failing to use transition shots between scenes or establishing shots or matching shots, and heavily focus on utilizing jump cuts both to convey a chaotic atmosphere and to express the reckless nature of his youthful character that jump through time and space. In addition, they were, especially at the start, working on low budgets. Godard often improvised with what schedules and materials he could afford. Out of all this came a group of conventions that were consistently used in the majority of French New Wave films including “Jump cuts”: a non-naturalistic edit, usually a section of a continuous shot that is removed unexpectedly, illogically, shooting on location, natural lighting, improvised dialogue and plotting, direct sound recording and long takes.

             Technique aside, Breathless (A bout de souffle) is notable for Godard’s Paris street photography was shot by an innovative cameraman named Raoul Coutard, who was willing to hide in a wheelbarrow for street shooting and to roll along in a wheelchair with the camera in his lap, Godard’s “score, which mixes jazz and Mozart.

            The movie Breathless are filmed documentary-style, outdoors, making use of the natural light, people unaware they’re being used as extras. The main goal behind the movie was to capture the reality in the stories they’re trying to tell while making aware to the audience that the film is just a film, not actual reality. In this movie, the beautiful shots of Paris and other places in France is enough of a selling point for this movie, every shot of this film could be a postcard.

             The movie is a great example of early independent film-making.  There was the jump-cut picture and sound editing, where Godard would cut within a scene instead of limiting himself to just between scenes. Also, the script was apparently not fully written before shooting began, and instead Godard created most of it each morning with input from the cast.  Then there was the incredible cinematography that often only used available light, including indoors throughout the lengthy bedroom scene.  

Style

The costume style in Breathless follow the style of early 1950s, there was no costume designer official costumes for the movie. Instead, Godard encouraged his actors to wear their own clothing and make choices they thought appropriate for each character which means that Godard allowed his own actors to dress up according to their own style of dressing. The authenticity behind to style that has made Breathless so memorable to people. Jean Seberg, in particular, became an icon for gamine chic right alongside Audrey Hepburn, and it's almost entirely because of her look in this movie.

            Although it is a classic movie, it also seems very fresh and modern and one of the movie that audiences can continue to draw inspiration from time and time again. With Breathless, and with every other film he's made since and he's still working today. Godard has essentially tried to please only himself, and hang what anybody else thinks. And in this world of test-screenings and demographics, that's why Breathless is still vital today.

Trailer of the movie, Have a look !

Le Samourai (1967)

       With 1967’s Le Samourai, director Jean-Pierre Melville generated the perfect mix of style, coolness, intelligence and suspense, and crafted one of the best crime dramas to ever be released. In terms of style and cool, none has ever been able to equal hitman Jef Costello, or even more so, the overall atmosphere created throughout the entire film. It screams of being hipper than anything you’ll ever see. Far from being based entirely on style, the script and direction takes the ultra-cool Costello character and allows Alain Delon to carry out a study into what makes a man like this tick.

         Melville probes into the killer’s psyche, laying out and ultimately testing the code that he has lived by for his entire professional life. And all of this is done in such a manner as to feel like one big game of chess, pitting the police force of Paris against the lone wolf assassin. It is suspenseful until the end and when it finally reaches its dramatic conclusion, it allows each viewer to recalibrate the events of the story to fit their own interpretation of the finish.       

         Jean-Pierre Melville creates a precise, taut, and elegant film in Le Samourai Jef's inscrutable, Bressonian demeanor is reflected through the use of austere colors (blues and grays), inclement weather, and pervasive silence to create an unnatural and unnerving atmosphere.

      Furthermore, the repeated image of the caged bird, the police interrogation and surveillance, and the pursuit in the Paris Metro (intercut with disorienting images of the position indicators lighting the intricate subway map), contribute to a sense of entrapment, as Jef attempts to evade everyone while pursuing Valerie, believing that she holds the key to the identities of the anonymous syndicate. Inevitably, Jef finds himself returning to the scene of the crime, to confront the enigmatic Valerie, and in the process, face his own destiny

Movie description 

                                 

               Le Samourai opens to a shot of rain beating onto the window of a darkened room. At the corner of the frame, a puff of smoke emanates from a lit cigarette. An occasional shrill chirp is heard from a caged bird. The rest is silence. An impassive man, Jef Costello (Alain Delon), rises from the bed, dons his trenchcoat and fedora, and leaves the room.

          Following the credits, text appears in the top right corner of the shot. The text reads, “There is no greater solitude that that of a samurai, unless it is that of the tiger in the jungle….perhaps…” The quote is attributed to Bushido (Book of Samurai), which Melville fabricated for the film, and illustrates the connection between Jef’s disciplined isolation and the social exile experience by the great worries like, Samurai.

           Immediately after the text appears in the frame, the shot begins undulating violently from rapid zoom-ins and zoom-outs. The mutation of the shot results in the shot actually being wider, the camera further away from Jef. His isolation and distance is intensified, correlating with the revelation of Jef as a type of ronin.

           Following the widening of the opening shot, Jef sits up in his bed and turns his back to the camera, facing the windowed wall, smoky light dancing over his head. He has turned away from the camera, away from the audience; go in further into his own separation and loneliness.

        The slow, lingering pace of the opening shot of “Le Samourai” sets the momentum of Melville’s film and the gray-blue dreariness of the color scheme is consistent throughout, almost as if Melville is attempting to make a color film in black and white.

                             

The minimal description of a man in a hat and raincoat is enough to get Jef caught in a dragnet along with dozens of the usual suspects.  A few at a time they are lined up on stage for the Martey's staff to examine. One man is positive that Jef is the killer, but the pianist, who has looked at him point blank, will not confirm his identity.

                             

The film’s structure is symmetrical, with the opening and closing acts mirroring one another. Each act involves Jef stealing a car and killing a man. The only difference is his motivation, which goes from monetary to self preservation, because the men who hired him to kill the first man are worried that Jef has become a liability after being questioned by the police.

Costume

Jef Costello every move makes has a purpose. His image is attenuated to this persona. Meticulous dress: a suit, a raincoat, and a hat that is always perfectly adjusted.

Styles

         Beginning the film with a superb bogus quote (“There’s no greater solitude that the Samurai’s, unless perhaps it be that of the tiger in the jungle,” written by the film maker but attributed to the Japanese “Book of Bushido”), Mr Melville achieved this simplicity through a sophisticated overview of the genre. His style remains haunting and elegantly spare, just right for the kind of hit man who lives in silence, in bare and colourless surroundings, with a lonely caged bird.

Paris belongs to us (1960)

Paris Belongs to Us takes place at Paris. Main characters include Anne Goupil, a young literature student, falls in with her brother Pierre’s friends. One of those is Philip Kaufman. At a party, they discuss the recent suicide of their bohemian musician friend Juan. Different theories about the death get tossed around, and Kaufman reacts violently. Only a day or so later Anne runs into Kaufman, who offers his own take: Juan was murdered as part of the plot of an ongoing worldwide conspiracy. The next to go, he states with certain conviction, will be Gerard, a theater director in this small but significant circle of friends struggling to put together a performance of Shakespeare’s Pericles. The common link between Gerard and Juan, beside their friendship, is Terry, Gerard’s current girlfriend and perhaps Juan’s previous.

Gerard has his eye on Anne and recruits her for a part she is unsuited to play in Pericles. As sexual tension builds between the two, Anne does some investigative work to track down the last recorded tape Juan made and which Gerard wishes he could use for his play. This leads Anne along many paths far enough afield of the main concerns as to elicit justified frustration—if the first half of Paris stays on a steady, if often languid, course in coaxing the viewer with evocative clues and colorful incidents, the second half vanishes in a fog of dead ends and underwhelming revelations. Ironically, in contrast to the conventional arc of the conspiratorial thriller, as Anne questions more of Juan’s friends and embroils herself in a possible underground political network, the allure of Kaufman’s conspiracy erodes. When Gerard asks Anne to give her opinion on Pericles, she states that it’s a disjointed work that makes sense on some other level of meaning. (Paris Belongs to Us, 2006)

The theme concepts of Paris Belongs to Us include youthful rebellion, social criticism and human relationships. In this movie, most of the scene is long shot or extreme long shot. Besides, none of the scene is shot at extreme close-up. Technique zooming out is also discovered in the movie. In editing, jump cut, dissolve, fade in & fade out is used. 

Jules and Jim (1962)

François Truffaut's landmark is a hard film to resurrect in a contemporary era that favors logic and emotional literalness over the French director's dreamy sense of the inevitability of disappointment and the invisibility of personal morality. A long-gestating pet project of the filmmaker, who happened across Henri-Pierre Roche's semi-autobiographical novel in a bargain bin in 1956 but waited to make it as his third film in 1961, Jules and Jim stands alongside Godard's Breathless as one of the early, instantly definitive films of the French New Wave, its impact on countless scores of subsequent films impossible to gauge.

            With an almost insurmountable liberty in his use of the cinematic form, Truffaut embraces contradiction to create meaning—Jules and Jim is sad yet humorous, breathless yet contemplative, universal yet hermetic, based on a book by a man in his 70s yet directed by a man in his 20s. It knows of life's folly so intimately that it is impossibly naïve, and its selfless love of the cinema borders on narcissistic. Another example of this reverie for art which profits from temporal manipulation occurs when Jules shows Jim photographs of his old girl friends. We see the photographs passed, yet the close ups to which we cut show Jim’s hands conspicuous by there absence.

Certainly one of the most striking features of Jules and Jim is temporal distortion. Truffaut utilises this effect by various means and for various purposes. In the first two minutes of the film, time is reduced in two ways: by the third person narrative, which encapsulates the film’s exposition in the most laconic of terms, describing the meeting and developing friendship of Jules and Jim, and also by the selective images which largely avoid redunant description of the aural narrative, but instead seek to interpret and compliment. Accordingly, when the narrator tells us that Jules is a foreigner in Paris; that he wants to go to an art student’s ball; and that Jim gets him a ticket and costume, the image we are offered is a simple one of the two playing dominoes. This image, incidentally, becomes a leitmotif in the film, supporting the theme of friendship and is touchingly varied much later when Jules plays instead with his daughter.

As well as temporal condensing and duality, Truffaut also makes use of temporal displacement. An early example of this occurs when Jules and Jim meet up with the anonymous anarchist’s girlfriend. The sequence begins with the girl running out of the frame to the left. The camera pans and we see her running away in a shot composed with shallow depth of field, with Jules and Jim out of focus in the distance. Another cut, this time bringing us in front of the girl. Again the camera pans, this time as the girl approaches. Another cut brings us in front of Jules and Jim. We begin to see the establishment of a pattern of shots in this sequence: cutting, panning, cutting, moving ahead, and panning and so on.

Truffaut, throughout Jules et Jim, uses various techniques—montage, freeze frame, rapid zoom etc.—to draw our attention to significant “hot spots.” Like a sudden cymbal crash in a romantic musical passage, these techniques demand our attention. To turn now from temporal to spatial distortion: an early example of this takes place when Catherine, Jules and Jim race across the bridge. The main purpose of this scene is character exposition, showing Catherine’s willingness to cheat—she is already cheating her femininity by dressing as a man—in order to attain her goals.

Truffaut make many and varied use of editing and montage. We shall examine first the way in which montage creates a narrative effect similar to, though in the absence of, the third person narrative. One characteristic example is the dress burning episode. The sequence begins with a long-take, composed in depth, with little activity. 

Another important example of montage as narrative occurs when Catherine throws herself off the bridge in mock suicide. Again we see rapid cutting, with five shots—this time static—in the space of only two seconds. 

The 400 Blows (1959)

The wonderful street lights and splendid architecture give a joy and contentment look of Paris city. However, not many people can look inside the lives of the people living in there. After I’ve watch The 400 Blows, I think that this movie was a well-made movie in all aspects. The movie making skills was brilliant, as well as the literary and dramatic aspects of the film combine to make a very pleasurable viewing experience. It is effective because it shows an example of the life of a seemingly typical young French boy in the late 1950s. The young boy is called Antoine Doinel.

In terms of good usage of literary aspects of film making, The 400 Blows is a perfect example. The plot, for instance, is complex; not only is there a conflict between Antoine and the authorities in his life, but there is also an ongoing conflict between his mother and father. Antoine is skipping school and keeping it from his parents, while his mother is cheating on his father, which also adds an element of secrecy to the plot. Eventually, these two problems collide when Antoine catches his mom kissing another man in the street: Antoine’s mother must be kinder to him in fear of him telling his father that she is unfaithful. Meanwhile, Antoine wants his mother to maintain his image of a good student for his father. These struggles for power and secrecy are important for building the plot, but also for building the characters. We can see from these events that Antoine has a good heart, but frequently rebels against authority because of the way his mother treats him. Also, we can see that Antoine’s mother does not care about the preservation of their family because she is unfaithful to her husband and she is always bitter at Antoine. Finally, the character of Antoine’s father is developed as tolerant and trusting: he didn’t believe that Antoine could be lying when he said he didn’t have his Michelin book. However, eventually Antoine’s father discovers how deeply Antoine broke his code of trust and in effect, practically disowns him.

The dramatic aspects of this film help develop the overall feel of the movie by adding visual details to keep the storyline moving not only in the plot, but also in the eyes of the viewer. In terms of costume and make-up, it is easy to see that Antoine’s mother is vain and cares mostly about her appearance. She is constantly fixing herself in front of the mirror and dresses very fashionably for the time, as shown in the scene when she is walking amidst the other mothers at the reform school, wearing dainty shoes and a careful hat and coat. She also looks very young to be a mother, especially compared to the other mothers in the movie. The mother effectively portrays her frustration in trying to bring up a rebellious child while being dissatisfied with her life at home. Lighting is also a very intense technique used in the film as a dramatic aspect. When Antoine is riding in the jail cart, all but his face is immersed in dark, displaying his loneliness in the world. As his face turns, the viewer notices a tear gleaming on his cheek, enhanced by the contrast of light and dark. Jean-Pierre Leaud is an actor who shows the innocent and childlike side of Antoine, but also his separation from his family and the rest of society, and being wiser about the problems of life than other children his age who have not felt problems between people. Antoine’s father, it seems, is not aware that his son is lying to him. However, the actor Albert Remy brings up hints about his knowledge that his wife is cheating on him, like his conversation with his wife that the audience does not see, but only hears from the other room with Antoine. It depicts his character as a man who tries to preserve his family at all costs, even tolerating an unfaithful wife. The poor father tries to make Antoine better, but finally gives up and sends him to a reform school. The superb make-up job, lighting and acting in The 400 Blows set it apart as a gem in terms of dramatic elements of film making.

Moreover, Cinematic elements are very important in making a movie, and the staff working on The 400 Blows seemed to know the secrets to making the most effective movie. In the introduction, the camera shots are long, focusing on the Eiffel Tower as the camera progressively nears the Parisian landmark. The distance starts out large and ends up right under the tower. This satisfies the introduction of the setting, for now we know that the story takes place in Paris, France. It is also a time when the main musical theme of the movie is introduced. The melody sounds nostalgic and lonely, a tribute to better days, like Antoine reminiscing about his past and dreaming about his future. Long camera shots are a reoccurring theme in the movie – they are evident especially in the end when Antoine is shown running away from the reform school, the scenery behind him changing gradually from forest to sea shore. At that moment, the movie is silent, except for Antoine’s heavy breathing. It is like a time in the end when the viewers can remember everything they learned about Antoine and sympathize with his fate. These cinematic elements provide a much more exciting viewing experience than would have otherwise been possible.

Overall, The 400 Blows is a film that demonstrates the failings of society, as a spirited young boy has his creativity and imagination crushed both at home and at school. Truffaut does an amazing job of building a total sense of hopelessness and despair; there are very few movies as depressing as The 400 Blows. While The 400 Blows is by no means a perfect film, its influence of french cinema can still be seen today.