Movie Movements

Films That Changed the World of Cinema

James Clarke

• Publisher: Kamera Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781842433058
• eBook ISBN: 9781842434444
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Introducing the reader to definitions of the founding concepts in film studies, this guide covers such ideas as authorship and genre, technological impacts and the rise of digital cinema, social influences and notions of the avant-garde, and cinema's emergence as a major art form that reflects and shapes the world. In concise and clear sections, it explores how major works—from the classic French realist La Regle de Jeu to the dazzling animation of Norman McLaren and the memorial documentary of Shoah—were conceived, developed, and produced, and eventually received by the public, critics, and film history. Offering a concise overview of a vast and compelling subject, it is a resource for both the film enthusiast and the film student.

NATIONAL CINEMA MOVEMENTS

It’s an ongoing part of the excitement of cinema that national cinemas rise, fall, reinvent themselves, re-emerge, fuse, and take it in turns to steal the limelight. In this age of home video, DVD and downloading, access to wider film culture has never been easier. Festivals proliferate and there is a genuine enthusiasm and hunger on the part of audiences for films from beyond the world of the mainstream, genre movie. The idea of a ‘national’ cinema can be considered a construction and film theorist Andrew Higson, in his essay The Concept of National Cinema,111 has discussed it in those terms, writing that we can think about national cinema in terms of economics, subject matter, representation of national character, and how and where the films are shown.

National cinemas that have powerfully announced themselves over the decades include the cinemas of Iran, Australia, Germany, Japan, China, Mexico and India. Furthermore, would it be fair to describe North America’s ‘national’ cinema as the Hollywood studio film; and, if so, how does the issue of the large, industrially organised studio sit within the current filmmaking climate where the producer can also be the distributor via online networks?

Critically, there may not be one definitive national cinema for each territory but instead a number of them.

The films discussed in this section have commonalities and differences, but all were committed to reinvigorating cinema at a given moment in time. Just a small range of national cinemas are considered here as representative of certain movements, and it’s fair to say that they could also be considered, for example, in terms of authorship and genre. To some degree the categories are always fluid, but national cinema in terms of subject and style are the key concerns in this section.

FRANCE

Jules et Jim (1961)

Directed by: François Truffaut

Written by: François Truffaut

Produced by: François Truffaut and Marcel Berbert

Edited by: Claudine Bouche

Cinematography: Raoul Coutard

Cast: Jeanne Moreau (Catherine), Oskar Werner (Jules), Henri Serre (Jim), Marie Dubois (Thérèse), Vanna Urbino (Gilberte), Sabine Haudepin (Sabine)

Synopsis

In the early years of the twentieth century, two young men, Jules and Jim, enjoy the good life in Paris. Women are the focus of their lives and, when they meet Catherine, it proves to be a life-changing moment for the three of them. Jules soon falls in love with Catherine as Jim looks on. The First World War begins and Jules and Jim go off to fight. Jules and Catherine marry and live in the Rhone valley in a rural idyll. Jim’s literary career takes off and he eventually comes to visit Catherine, Jules and their little girl, Sabine. During his stay, his long-burning passion for Catherine is rekindled and her own unhappiness with her marriage leads to them developing a relationship in full view of Jules. As the years pass, the triangle between Catherine, Jules and Jim becomes increasingly fraught.

Concept

As a key player in the French New Wave of the 1950s, François Truffaut was vocal about his creative debt to directors such as Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock. Renoir represented the ‘art cinema’ sensibility and Hitchcock the populist approach. If we can imagine a fusion between the approaches of these two filmmakers, it might help us reach an understanding of the range of cinematic devices employed by Truffaut and his similarly ‘legendary’ contemporaries, most notably Jean-Luc Godard who made such oblique statements as, ‘Tracking shots are a question of morality.’112

1959 was the watershed year for the French New Wave, with a number of key films released embodying the movement’s spirit: Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette, 1960), A Bout de Souffle (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960), Les Cousins (Claude Chabrol, 1959) and The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959). The 400 Blows won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Rather like the Italian neorealist films of the mid-and late-1940s there was an endeavour to make French cinema explore human experience with a certain fidelity to reality.

Godard committed to re-imagining cinema’s capacities and challenging audiences. Just watch a film like Tout Va Bien (1972) for evidence of this.

It might be fairly accurate to suggest that the French New Wave, like other avant-garde cinema movements, was a conscious effort to provide an alternative to the dominance of the American, studio-produced movie. As such, it’s very much an issue of identity. The avant-garde movie is defined as much by what it’s about as it is by how it was produced and distributed; and in these days of YouTube and equivalent outlets, the concept is all the more alive and vibrant.

So an art movie isn’t only defined by its story, but by the conditions in which it has been produced. There’s also been a tendency to emphasise a certain kind of realism, quite in contrast to the artifice of the studio-produced picture. Art cinema, though, is still a product-led process with an economic structure and an audience with expectations that need satisfying. Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) is an ‘art cinema’ science-fiction film that embodies many of the traits and tendencies that defined the French avant-garde film movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

In the years immediately following the end of World War Two, France was inundated by a backlog of American movies that had been banned during the conflict. The 1950s, then, became a major moment in the evolution of French cinema and, in part, created the conditions under which the French New Wave movement flourished. The French New Wave, then, was one more link in the chain of refreshing, renewing, re-inventing and making the old new. Jill Forbes has observed that ‘the war had brought home film’s significance as a means of propaganda and as a way of promoting national cohesion’.113

The French New Wave was a conscious movement, in part codified by a 1954 manifesto, The Time of Contempt: A Certain Tendency of French Cinema, written by critic, and later filmmaker, François Truffaut, for Cahiers du Cinema. Then, too, there were the francs-tireurs (the independents). For Truffaut the idea was to create a cinema of authored, identifiable movies. The term nouvelle vague was coined by French journalist Françoise Giraud. For the New Wave director, there was a refusal of the ‘tradition of quality’. Which means what? Well, the term had originally been used not by Truffaut but by journalist Jean-Pierre Barot in L’Ecran francais, and it referred to the assumed middlebrow respectability of French cinema’s tendency to adapt literary source material and to do so without much sense of filmic dynamism.

The New Wave blurred lines of difference and distinction between writers, directors and actors. In turn, this mode proved immensely attractive to certain American filmmakers of the late-1960s and 1970s. Perhaps the most accurate observation we can make is that there is an ongoing, unfolding reciprocity of working methods and aesthetic approaches between all the film-producing cultures of the world.

Another defining quality of the French New Wave, espoused by Claude Chabrol, was that small subjects were utterly valid, and this fits somewhat with the literary idea of writing what you know. Jill Forbes again: ‘The preoccupations of the nouvelle vague matched those of the more clearly avant-garde directors like Alain Resnais or Agnès Varda, whose films explicitly interrogate the relationship between fiction and documentary and between naturalism and formalism. However, it was the sexual politics of nouvelle vague films that occasioned most re-evaluation.’114

Another filmmaker for whom cinema was a chance to investigate harsh human truths and dilemmas was Robert Bresson whose work includes Mouchette (1966), A Man Escaped (1956), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Pickpocket (1959), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) and L’argent (1983).

Truffaut’s film Jules et Jim was adapted from a novel by 75-year-old Henri-Pierre Roché. The film has visual flair. It covers 20 years in the lives of three characters: friends Jules and Jim, and Catherine, the woman they both love. The film is a classic of the French New Wave and, like other French New Wave movies, is steeped in references to other media.

Production

Consistent with the spirit of the New Wave, Jules et Jim was filmed on location and built on the example of the Italian neorealist tradition.

Truffaut found the source novel at a second-hand bookstall in Paris in 1955. It was the author’s first novel and Truffaut felt confident that it would make the basis of a compelling film. Truffaut spent two weeks in September 1960 at the Colombe d’Or in Saint Paul de Venice rewriting the script as he hadn’t liked the draft he had given to Henri-Pierre Roche, the novel’s author, in 1957. He used Roché’s notebooks to inform the revision. The new draft was much more about Catherine’s love for both Jules and Jim.

Jeanne Moreau and Truffaut had a warm working relationship and he felt compelled to cast her in a film in which she could be seen smiling, quite a contrast with her downbeat work in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961). Accounts of pre-production on Jules et Jim all attest to it being a happy experience, though Truffaut, like many filmmakers before and since, was concerned about who would distribute the film. Production began in Normandy on 10 April 1961. The eventual first cut of the film ran to 150 minutes and so needed to be compressed. To enhance the work further, Truffaut called in an ally, a journalist-turned-filmmaker named Jean Aurel, who worked with him on refining the film’s structure. Compounding Truffaut’s creative anxieties were intense fears about death.

Text: Drama, Image, Sound

One of the great tragic love stories, Jules et Jim sees one man struggle to pursue happiness and another quietly resign himself to life’s disappointments. The closing image of Jules walking alone along a pathway is heavy with the weight of loss that life brings with it.

The film’s music score by Georges Delerue is bittersweet throughout, ably supporting the action and functioning in its own right as a musical entity away from the images. As the relationship between Jules, Jim and Catherine becomes more complicated, so the score bec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• REALISM
• EXPRESSIONISM
• AVANT-GARDE AND ART CINEMA
• SURREALISM
• THE DOCUMENTARY VISION
• SOVIET MONTAGE
• NATIONAL CINEMA MOVEMENTS
• DIGITAL CINEMA: NEW WAYS OF MOVING THE WORLD
• FURTHER READING
• Advertisement
• Plates
• Copyright