FORL 3160

Horacio Castillo-Perez

07/28/04

The French New Wave movement showed a strong affinity for Hollywood genre films, reworking them to suit the radical movement’s style and agenda.  France would take Hollywood elements of filmmaking (from genres like the crime thrillers and the film noir) and incorporate them to their own tradition and create something new and fresh.  In the same fashion, Hollywood was influenced by the movies that were being made in France.

MORE DIRECTORS OF THE FRENCH NEW WAVE

Alain Resnais- Director of “Hiroshima Mon Amour”. 

“Night and Fog”- a documentary about the Holocaust during WWII.

“Hiroshima Mon Amour”

Having made a documentary about the holocaust, Resnais thought that he needed to make a fiction film to tackle the subject of the bombing of Hiroshima.  The movie is about a woman who is making a movie about Hiroshima who meets a Japanese man while she’s working in Japan.  They are both married and are having an affair.  While in bed, she starts to remember, and reconstruct in her memory, the city of Hiroshima before and after the dropping of the atomic bomb.  At the same time, the man tells her, repeatedly, that she has not seen anything, that she does not know Hiroshima.  However she fights him with her memory: images from documentaries are shown along with footage from the Hiroshima museum and different streets in the city of Hiroshima. 

The movie deals with the issues of memory and oblivion.  In the opening scene where the man and the woman are in bed talking about the bombing of Hiroshima there is a juxtaposition love and death.  Love is represented by them in bed, and death is present in their conversation about the tragic event of the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima.

“Last year at Marienbad” by A. Resnais

            This movie is built around a series of flashbacks that are used as a metaphor for the way memory operates: the act of remembering.  The use of a German Baroque palace emphasizes the way memory works: stopping, remembering every detail as a viewer observing all the details in a heavily decorated wall of the palace. 

            Resnais, deliberately, uses a slow pace of the camera to convey the way memory operates in the human brain.  The slow movement recreates the journey that memory makes in time while remembering specific events.

Francois Truffaut-Director of “Jules et Jim”

            Truffaut was perhaps the most financially successful French director of the French New-Wave.  His movies, unlike other French directors of the same time, are more easily classifiable as belonging to a specific genre: comedy, drama, etc.  However, his films have a twist that, within the limits of a specific genre, creates something refreshing and new.

“Jules et Jim”

            Perhaps one of the most outstanding elements of the movie is the rather distant, ironic eye of the omniscient narrator.  The movie explores the friendship between Jules and Jim, and the love triangle formed when Catherine makes the duo a trio.  Truffaut uses elements drawn from the New Wave style such as zooms, flash cuts and freeze frames, conveying the carefree lifestyle of the young trio.

Chris Marker- Director of “La Jettee”

            The movie is almost entirely composed of individual frozen pictures with sparse narration.  This movie was the basis for Gillian’s “Twelve Monkeys”.  Set in the near future, “La Jettee” shows the story of how the earth, surviving a nuclear holocaust, has driven the remnants of humanity underground.  This movie is very experimental, and its style was rather innovative at the time.