FILMS TO BUY / WATCH !

Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B0007IK5UK/ref=dp_olp_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1205929172&sr=1-1

Jules et Jim, Francois Truffaut, 1961
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/offer-listing/B00005UBKU/ref=dp_olp_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1205929407&sr=1-1

Breathless, Jean Luc Godard, 1959
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Breathless-Jean-Seberg/dp/B000051YHO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1205929443&sr=1-1

ACTION PLAN

What have already done:
- read generally around the topic of French New Wave
- googled ideas
- narrowed down topic area
- chosen potential title
- detailed proposal chart
- academic web search

NEED TO DO:
- organise relevant websites and resources
- start talking to potential people to take part in questionnaires/focus groups
- write questions, prepare clips, organise time/location etc.
- order films/find in library?
- find academic books -revisit to BFI library/local?
- popular criticism
- read retrieve select reject analyse and summarise research already collected
- read past essay -breakdown structure
- organise for what parts of the essay research collected is useful for
- textually analyse texts -watch all films take thorough notes, record own responses, key concepts
- plan and conduct focus groups/interviews -analyse, compare and contrast results with other research


WEEK 10 - 17TH MARCH
- organise relevant websites and resources
- order films/find in library?
- read retrieve select reject analyse and summarise research already collected

WEEK 11 - 24TH MARCH
- start talking to potential people to take part in questionnaires/focus groups
- find academic books -revisit to BFI library/local?
- popular criticism
- read past essay -breakdown structure

WEEK 12 - 31ST MARCH

EASTER HOLIDAYS 4TH APRIL -----draft in progress!-----

WEEK 1 - 21ST APRIL

WEEK 2 - 28TH APRIL

WEEK 3- 5TH MAY
Thurs 8th May mock exam

DETAILED PROPOSAL

1. Topic Area
French New Wave -characterisation focusing on gender, age and stylistic features

2. Proposed title, question, hypothesis
To what extent is characterisation in French New Wave affected by gender, age and stylistic features?

3. Teacher approval granted, in principal?
Yes

4. Principle texts (if text based study)
French New Wave - Jean Douchet

5. Reason for choice
Interested by movement and impact has had on modern cinema
Surrealist, artistic directing

6. Academic context for this study (similar research, relevant theory, named theorists)
Auteur theory
Alexandre Astruc - film critic and director, contributed to auteur theory
Andre Bazin - film critic and theorist, co-founder of film magazine Cahiers du Cinema
Critics for Cahiers du Cinema - Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette

7. Institutional context for this study (industry focus, other texts for comparison, named practitioners, relevant theory, issues, questions)
See previous

8. Identify the audience context for this study (audience profile, access to audience, potential sample)
- Arrange viewings with wide range of audiences - record responses according to different gender and age
- Characters accessiblity and emotional/personal connection with the audience (maybe to particular genders/ages)
- Typical audience profile
- Audience responses to extreme and more subtle stylistic features used in the process of characterisation

9. How will the 4 key concepts be relevant to your study (audience, institution, forms and conventions, representation)?
Audience - identification with characters, understanding, reactions, responses
Institution - how directors used characterisation to express their artistic ideas, develop plot/narrative, choice of actors/actresses, distancing effects towards audience
Forms + Conventions - contrast to strict narrative, unchallenging plots in Hollywood film
Representation - alternate representation of sexes, age

10 Potential research sources (secondary): secondary academic books and websites, secondary industry books and websites, secondary popular criticism. Please identify specific examples you have come across.
www.sensesofcinema.com
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Stephen_Nottingham/cintxt2.htm

11. Potential research sources (primary): audience reception research, your own content/textual analysis etc
Questionnaires/focus groups/1 to 1 interviews -audience responses
Textual analysis of films

12. Modifications agreed with your lead teacher
----

13. Potential limits/obstacles/problems?
- availability of films?
- alot of research/criticism in French (Cahiers du Cinema)

FEEDBACK

Things I need to do:

- detailed proposal
- action plan
- set out and clearly explain different parts to question (gender/age/stylistic features)
- narrow down and read through research/articles -analyse

CHARACTERISATION + FNW RESEARCH

STEPHEN NOTTINGHAM
CHARACTERS
Existentialism stressed the individual, the experience of free choice, the absence of any rational understanding of the universe and a sense of the absurdity in human life. Faced with an indifferent world an existentialist seeks to act authentically, using free will and taking responsibility for all their actions, instead of playing pre-ordained roles dictated by society. The characters in French New Wave films are often marginalized, young anti-heroes and loners, with no family ties, who behave spontaneously, often act immorally and are frequently seen as anti-authoritarian. There is a general cynicism concerning politics, often expressed as a disillusionment with foreign policy in Algeria or Indo-China. In Godard's A Bout de Souffle (1959) the protagonist kills and shows no remorse, while in Varda's Cléo de 5 á 7 (1961) the protagonist stops playing the roles others expect of her, when she discovers she has cancer, and starts to live authentically.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Stephen_Nottingham/cintxt2.htm


ACTORS/ACTRESSES
The acting was a marked departure from much that had gone before. The actors were encouraged to improvise their lines, or talk over each others lines as would happens in real-life. In A Bout de Souffle this leads to lengthy scenes of inconsequential dialogue, in opposition to the staged speeches of much traditional film acting. Monologues were also used, for example in Godard's Charlotte and her Bloke (1959); as were voice-overs expressing a character's inner feelings, as in Rohmer's La Boulangère Du Monceau. The actors in these films were not big stars prior to the French New Wave, but a group of stars soon became associated with the films including Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Jeanne Moreau. Women were often given strong parts, that did not conform to the archetypal roles seen in most Hollywood cinema, for example, Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962) and Corinne Marchand in Varda's Cléo de 5 á 7.

PERSONAL CINEMA
French New Wave cinema was a personal cinema. The film-makers were writers who were skilful at examining relationships and telling humane stories. Truffaut's films were particularly autobiographical. His first full-length film Les Quatre Cents Coups drew upon his early life, and the life-story of the main character Antoine Doinel was developed through three subsequent films: Antoine et Colette (1962), Baisers Volés (1968) and Domicile Conjugal (1970).


SENSES OF CINEMA : TRUFFAUT'S 400 BLOWS
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/6/blows.html


Truffaut, the enfant terrible of the French New Wave, was its most loved representative whose auterist vision as a filmmaker espoused, contra French academic cinema, a cinema of tomorrow that took place in the streets and apartments of one's life and that jettisoned the predictability of a verbally dominated cinema recognisable for its polished literary dialogue, elaborate movie sets, ornate photography and movie stars. A cinema that clearly attests to Alexander Astruc's "camero stylo " view of cinema: "The filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen." A cinema that speaks of ordinary experiences and situations, fragile individuals, daily recognisable language and emotions where the director displays a non-superior relationship to his characters.

The 400 Blows, along with Les Mistons (1957), The Wild Child (1969) and Small Change (1969), represent one of the most tender and loving depictions of childhood in cinema. Truffaut's characteristic sensitive and non-sentimental view of his children characters denotes a respect for children living in a difficult world made by adults. It is a lyrical poetic realism that is central to two influential films for The 400 Blows - Vigo's Zero for Conduct (1933) and Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero (1947) - and significantly informs Truffaut's hypnotically moving debut feature. The 400 Blows (which could have been tellingly titled The Awkward Age) is one of the rare few films that represents childhood and its turbulent knife-edge ambiguous emotions and situations in a searching, intimate and tender way communicating to us collective emotional truths. Truffaut focusing on his own childhood experiences - forging a "cinema in the first person singular" - is also speaking to us about our own childhood. This double emotional quality of the individual and the collective in the film is one of its more appealing simple qualities. As Rivette informs us in his Cahiers review of the film: "in speaking of himself, he seems to be speaking of us."

Crucially then, the haunting lyricism of The 400 Blows is based on Truffaut's Renoirian focus on the extraordinary features of his own "ordinary" childhood situations and individuals, and, characteristic of Truffaut's oeuvre, he never sacrificed the abstract for the individual. Truffaut (á la Renoir) discovered the superlatively gifted and unpredictable Léaud (whose presence in French New Wave Cinema is one of its numerous mesmerising qualities) for his debut fictional biography - and he became Truffaut's double in the Antoine Doinel films (the Doinel character being a rich synthesis of Truffaut himself and Léaud's own personality). Keeping in Renoir's spirit, Truffaut learned the lesson of valuing the actor over the character in a given film, and consequently, as the Antoine Doinel films progressed, Léaud's own personal characteristics and dialogue took over rather than strictly adhering to the script. Stolen Kisses in this context was the crucial film.


------
Bazin, André, What is Cinema?, vols. 1 & 2, essays selected and translated by H Gray (University of California Press, 1967 & 1971)Harvey, Sylvia,May ‘68 and Film Culture (BFI, 1980)Hayward, Susan, French National Cinema (Routledge, 1993)Hillier, Jim (ed), Cahiers du Cinéma: 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Routledge and Kegan Paul/BFI, 1980)Hillier, Jim (ed), Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood (Routledge and Kegan Paul, BFI, 1986)

BFI LIBRARY ARTICLES

VERTIGO V3 N7 AUTUMN 2007 P58-59

FILMS TO LOOK AT:
Alain Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 1959
Robert Rossellini, Journey to Italy, 1953
Ingmar Bergman, Summer with Monika, 1952

INITIAL RESEARCH

FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/truffaut.html#senses

PASSION, LOVE AND OTHER PROBLEMS IN HIS FILMS:
LOVE TRIANGLES, CASUAL PARTNERS, ADULTERY + SELF PLEASURING

Truffaut seemed set to become reconciled with a maternal image, but more importantly still, confessed the passion that fed him and that adorned his cinema. From the prostitutes of his youth to the most glamorous film stars within his reach, his fascination for female love had no limit.
Plyne (Serge Davri) in TIREZ SUR LE PIANISTE: "Woman is pure, delicate, fragile. Women are marvellous, women are supreme. For me women were always supreme".
JULES ET JIM (1962), an adaptation of a novel by Henri-Pierre Roché which he had read years earlier, is an ideal film to show us the no strings attached and unpredictable woman that he admired so much.

Another love triangle, but with a change of gender, is articulated in LES DEUX ANGLAISES ET LE CONTINENT, also based on a novel by Roche. The focus of attention is this time a man
The director tries to show us here the different phases that a romantic relationship endures as people mature: at the beginning the adolescent platonic love between Claude and Muriel, later the adult physical love between Claude and Anne. Between these two extremes Truffaut depicted the transitory nature of casual partners that serve to instruct, as well as adultery and self-pleasuring. Death will also play its hand to end this affective conflict.

Truffaut identified passionate love with insanity, with the incapacity to think with clarity when faced by the object of our affection. And what is more curious, he saw this passion as an excess that must be punished, generally by death, as we observe even in LES MISTONS. His idea of marriage is no more diaphanous, generally teaming it with boredom that justifies the extramarital adventures. There is marital tedium in LES QUATRE CENTS COUPS, in Tirez SUR LE PIANISTE, in LA PEAU DOUCE, in LA FEMME D'À CÔTÉ. Marriage as an institution leads to sorrow in LA MARIÉE ÉTAIT en noir and to degradation and deceit in LA SIRÈNE DU MISSISSIPPI.

In Truffaut's stories there is generally a strong and earthy woman set against a man with childlike traits

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/04/baisers_voles.html
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/05/35/la_nuit_americaine.html


FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT : A KEY INFLUENCE IN MODERN CINEMA, HIS PASSIONATE FILMMAKING STILL SEDUCES
MARTIN SCORSESE

Truffaut carried that sense of history into his moviemaking. Back in the early and mid-'60s, people were always talking about how this movie "quoted" from that older movie, but what almost no one talked about was why the quote was there, what it did or didn't do for the movie, what it meant emotionally to the picture as a whole.

In Truffaut, you could feel the awareness of film history behind the camera, but you could also see that every single choice he made was grounded in the emotional reality of the picture. There are many echoes of Hitchcock in his movies, blatantly so in The Soft Skin (underrated at the time of its release, and a favorite of mine) and The Bride Wore Black, not so blatantly in many other movies, and it's almost impossible to quantify the importance of Jean Renoir to Truffaut (or, for that matter, of Henry James, of Honoré de Balzac—Truffaut was also a great reader). But if you look at those movies carefully, you will see that there's nothing extraneous or superficial.

There are things that Truffaut did in those early movies that left a lasting impression: the opening expository section of Jules and Jim, where time and space is abolished and the images flow like music across the screen; the series of shots from Fahrenheit 451 (another underrated picture) where the camera moves in close-closer-closest on a character in imminent danger, which I admit I've duplicated many times in my own films. And the character played by Charles Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player, who keeps almost acting but never does until it's too late, had a profound effect on me, and on many other filmmakers.

Time—the desire to slow it down coupled with the harsh reality of its swift passing ... Truffaut had a great gift for giving form to this sensation. In a way, it's all encapsulated in a moment near the end of Two English Girls—yet another underrated picture, this time a masterpiece—where Jean-Pierre Léaud's character suddenly glances at himself in the mirror and murmurs the words: "My God, I look old." And then that moment is over. That's life. And that's Truffaut.

http://www.time.com/time/europe/hero2006/truffaut.html