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

FRENCH NEW WAVE

During my research into French auteurs and arthouse films I found that most of these were from or heavily influenced by the French New Wave.

HISTORY
- group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced (in part) by Italian Neorealism

- self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm. Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style, and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm.

- Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette, began as critics for the famous film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.

- Co-founder and theorist André Bazin was a prominent source of influence for the movement. - - the auteur theory -holds that the director is the "author" of his movies, with a personal signature visible from film to film.

- Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958) is generally credited as the first New Wave feature. Truffaut, with The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard, with Breathless (1960) had unexpected international successes, both critical and financial, that turned the world's attention to the activities of the New Wave and enabled the movement to flourish.

- French New Wave was “in style” roughly between 1958 and 1964, although popular New Wave work existed as late as 1973. The socio-economic forces at play shortly after World War II strongly influenced the movement. A politically and financially drained France tended to fall back to the old popular traditions before the war.

- One such tradition was straight narrative cinema, specifically classical French film. The movement has its roots in rebellion against the reliance on past forms (often adapted from traditional novellic structures), criticizing in particular the way these forms could force the audience to submit to a dictatorial plot-line.

- New Wave critics and directors studied the work of these and other classics. They did not reject them, but rather found a new outlet for the same creative energies. The low-budget approach helped film-makers get at the essential art form and find what, to them, was a much more comfortable and honest form of production.

STYLE
- The movies featured unprecedented methods of expression, such as seven-minute tracking shots (like the famous traffic jam sequence in Godard's 1967 film Week End). Also, these movies featured existential themes, such as stressing the individual and the acceptance of the absurdity of human existence.

- Lightweight cameras, lights, and sound equipment allowed the New Wave directors to shoot in the streets, rather than in studios. This fluid camera motion became a trademark of the movement, with shots often following characters down Paris streets.

- Many of the French New Wave films were produced on small budgets, often shot in a friend's apartment, using the director's friends as the cast and crew. Directors were also forced to improvise with equipment (for example, using a shopping cart for tracking shots). The cost of film was also a major concern; thus, efforts to save film turned into stylistic innovations: for example, in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (À bout de souffle), several scenes feature jump cuts, as they were filmed in one long take: parts that didn't work were simply cut right from the middle of the take, a purposeful stylistic decision.

The cinematic stylings of French New Wave brought a fresh look to cinema with improvised dialogue, rapid changes of scene, and shots that go beyond the common 180º axis. The camera was used not to mesmerize the audience with elaborate narrative and illusory images, but to play with and break past the common expectations of cinema.

The techniques used to shock the audience out of submission and awe were so bold and direct that Jean-Luc Godard has been accused of having contempt for his audience. His stylistic approach can be seen as a desperate struggle against the mainstream cinema of the time, or a degrading attack on the viewer’s naivete. Either way, the challenging awareness represented by this movement remains in cinema today. Effects that now seem either trite or commonplace, such as a character stepping out of her role in order to address the audience directly, were radically innovative at the time.

Classic French cinema adhered to the principles of strong narrative, creating what Godard described as an oppressive and deterministic aesthetic of plot. In contrast, New Wave filmmakers made no attempts to suspend the viewer’s disbelief; in fact, they took steps to constantly remind the viewer that a film is just a sequence of moving images, no matter how clever the use of light and shadow. The result is a set of oddly disjointed scenes without attempt at unity; or an actor whose character changes from one scene to the next; or sets in which onlookers accidentally make their way onto camera along with extras, who in fact were hired to do just the same.

At the heart of New Wave technique is the issue of money and production value. In the context of social and economic troubles of a post-WWII France, filmmakers sought low-budget alternatives to the usual production methods. Half necessity and half vision, New Wave directors used all that they had available to channel their artistic visions directly to the theatre.

SPECIFIC FILMS -to be continued

HENRY-GEORGES CLOUZOT
Quay of the Goldsmiths - Quai des Orfèvres
The Wages of Fear - Le Salaire de la peur
La Vérité

JEAN COCTEAU
The Blood of a Poet - Le Sang d'un Poete
Orpheus – Orphée
Testament of Orpheus - Le Testament d'Orphée
Beauty and the Beast - La Belle et la Bête


BRUNO DUMONT
Twentynine Palms
Humanité

JACQUES DEMY
Lola
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg - Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
The Young Girls of Rochefort - Les Demoiselles de Rochefort

JEAN LUC GODARD
Breathless - À bout de souffle
Vivre sa Vie - It's My Life
Contempt - Le Mépris
Bande à part - Band of Outsiders
Pierrot le fou - "Pete the madman"

MICHEL GONDRY
The Science of Sleep - La Science des rêve

http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/varda.html

AGNES VARDA
Cléo from 5 to 7 - Cléo de 5 à 7
Vagabond - Sans toit ni loi "without roof or law"
The Gleaners and I - Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse

JEAN VIGO
L'Atalante

FRANCOIS TRUFFAUT
Shoot the Piano Player - Tirez sur le pianiste
Jules and Jim
Fahrenheit 451
La Nuit américaine
The 400 Blows - Les Quatre Cents Coups

FILM RESEARCH

FRENCH AUTEURS

Jean-Jacques Beineix
Luc Besson
Robert Bresson
Henri-Georges Clouzot
Jean Cocteau
Bruno Dumont
Jacques Demy
Abel Gance
Jean-Luc Godard
Michel Gondry
Danièle Huillet
Agnès Varda
Jean Vigo
François Truffaut
Jacques Tati
Jean-Marie Straub
Éric Rohmer
Jean Renoir
Francois Ozon
Louis Malle
Chris Marker Georges Méliès
Jean-Pierre Melville
Marcel Carné
Claude Chabrol
René Clair

SHOCKING CINEMA

Bunuel and Dali's Un chien andalou (1928) remains one of the most shocking films ever made.


FILM AS A SUBVERSIVE ART - AMOS VOGEL

'Intending Film as a Subversive Art to profile the “accelerating world-wide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored,” Vogel seized the opportunity to introduce these unfamiliar films and filmmakers to a broader audience than the societies and festivals could ever reach. Though a few who worked outside of conventional guidelines had established their own followings (notably Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage), Vogel offered equal time to just about anyone whose films provided instances of truth and wisdom while subverting linear narrative structure and the limitations imposed by time and space—“a cinema of experience rather than entertainment” derived from “the subversion of consciousness.” '

- This book would be useful if I were to choose a question to do with the anti rules created and controversial issues dealt with in art film /'shokcing cinema' focussing on European art films
- OR the intentional detachments of art film / form conventions

ART CINEMA + AUTEURS

ART CINEMA
European cinema is predominantly art cinema

Teaching World Cinema: Kate Gamm p22

Susan Hayward:
‘A certain type of European cinema that is experimental in technique and narrative’

‘…in art cinema narrative codes and conventions are disturbed and the narrative line is fragmented so there is no seamless cause and effect storyline.’

‘these films are character rather than plot led […] this absence of heroes is an important feature of art cinema.’
Characters in art cinema
- who seen as most heroic/aspiring
- Does where we are from effect who we see as the hero? Actors may be stars in their own countries and not other –how does this effect?
- Do foreign audiences feel more distanced or empowered by freedom of interpretation which they have been given through art cinema? –contrast to viewpoints given by Hollywood films

‘Intentionally distances spectators to create a reflective space for them to assume their own critical space or subjectivity in relation to the screen or film.


AUTEUR THEORY
A director’s work which features a consistency of style/theme/approach
In world cinema auteur theory tends to be more prevalent

Lukas Moodysson, Swedish, Show Me Love
Claire Denis, French, La Haine
David Lynch

BFI: AUTEUR THEORY/AUTEURS

AUTHORSHIP + THE FILMS OF DAVID LYNCH


CASESTUDIES:
Swedish cinema: Show Me Love, Together, The Idiots, Lilya 4-Ever, Festen, Mifune, Italian for Beginners

French film: Amelie, La Haine, Code Unknown, Harry He’s Here to Help,
Art cinema -Beau Travail,

British: secrets and lies, all or nothing, Land and Freedom, Bread and Roses

Mexican/Latin American – Central Station, Behind the Sun, City of God, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Amores Perros, 21 Grams

WORLD CINEMA

MORE QUESTION IDEAS...

- Differences between World and Western cinema
culture and history
auteurism (a directors films reflecting their personal creative visions)
funding and distribution
exhibition and distribution

- British cinema as European cinema
- British cinema in contrast to European
- Diversity within European cinema
- hollywood representations of countries - contrast with own cinemathe anti
- foreign cinema as art cinema - stylistic features
- art cinema as shocking cinema
- the anti rules and controversial issues dealt with in cinematci new waves - British/ Danish -dogme 95, Mexican and Latin American -Chicano
- who are the audiences for foreign films

Femme Fatale + Film Noir

Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize moral ambiguity and sexual motivation.

One of the types of noir women: the femme fatale is an alluring and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations.

USEFUL LINKS
No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir
The Femme Fatale

High Heels on Wet Pavement: Film Noir and the Femme Fatale

The Femme Fatale Throughout History

EARLY IDEAS

I've narrowed down my choices to the two areas:

WOMEN + FILM

WORLD CINEMA

Potential questions for these are...

World Cinema
How a countries common values and beliefs effect the way they deal with certain issues in a film?
- this question in its current stage is too general. I need to specify which country these films should be from, a particular issue and look into reactions contrast this with.

Women and Film
- looking at the role of femme fatales in films -who plays them? conventional characteristics/actions? history?
- femme fatales in film noir