Class Minutes:  Mon 03/26/01  French New Wave

Prof. Reimer began the discussion of French New Wave by stating that the movement started circa 1959 and continued on thru the 60s.  Despite the end of the movement, some of the French New Wave’s biggest directors continue to make films, despite the end of the hype. The biggest names of the French New Wave:

Alain Resnais - Hiroshima, My Love

Jean-Luc Godard - Breathless

Francois Truffaut - 400 Blows

All 3 of these directors came out with films in 1959(listed above), in which they each took a different approach, reacting against the French film industry which they viewed as stale at the time.  They felt that the French film was a carbon copy of Hollywood entertainment, good looking but with minimal message.  The French New Wave directors wanted to make films that despite being less polished(due to less money), said something about the youth, contemporary France, human relationships.  They borrowed from directors before them and took another direction.  Godard had a political focus, while Resnais was more literary and philosophical, and Truffaut focused on relationships and was the most accessible.

Resnais’ 1955 film, Night and Fog, was a documentary and one of the first film’s to deal with the Holocaust in Germany.  The film while not dealing directly with the French role in Holocaust and their collaboration with the Germans in allowing the deportation of Jews, does have police officials in French uniforms in the concentration camp sequences, thus perhaps alluding to a French role.  When the film was finished the French government felt that it was too negative and made Resnais cover logos on the French uniforms.  The film deals with memory and how we remember things we don’t want to.

After Night and Fog, Resnais was asked to do a documentary about the A-Bomb being dropped on Hiroshima.  Instead of making a documentary, he embeds documentary inside a fiction film in which he tells a story about an actress who goes to Japan to film a documentary on Hiroshima.  Hiroshima, My Love(1959) opens with a Japanese man and a French woman making love while talking about Hiroshima.  Resnais interrupts their love making with flashbacks of fire, wounded Japanese, and scenes from a Hiroshima museum.  This juxtaposition of the lovers and the scenes of destruction create a striking contrast.  Professor Reimer remembers viewing the movie at age 17 and being blown away by it.  Resnais makes the relationship more complex by making the woman a collaborator; she had a relationship with a German soldier who was killed.  She has blacked out the memory of this relationship, but it is slowly conjured up by viewing the scenes of Hiroshima.  The Japanese man is the lone survivor from his family of the A-Bomb.  The film helps viewers come to terms with a historical event thru a fictional story.  Resnais makes it so the camera is always going forward and probing, while being juxtaposed with the flashbacks of Hiroshima.

Hiroshima, My Love is a movie in black and during the bed scene that we viewed, the woman keeps insisting that she says she remembers the scenes of Hiroshima, while the man insists that she doesn’t remember.  The French language is being spoken so clearly and the beauty of the language is on display.  The woman continues to insist she remembers the death and destruction, but the man insists she doesn’t remember, that she can’t understand it because she hasn’t experienced it.  When the woman has her flashbacks of her love affair with a German soldier, we see a contrast of universal suffering and private suffering.  No director had attempted to tell a story this way before.  This film ushered in the French New Wave.

Prof. Reimer in response to a question stated that subtitled films are usually relegated to art houses and that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon(2000) was an exception, building success on hype, marketing(the trailer never once mentioned its subtitled), Ang Lee’s reputation after Sense and Sensibility, and success at the Toronto Film Festival.  Another foreign movie, Red Violin(1998) did not succeed in the large market because of unfavorable reviews and because it was too cerebral and better suited for an art house.

We then moved on to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless(1959), a film about the youth in France at the time.  The underclass hero of the movie is a punk who sees himself as a Humphrey Bogart type, always smoking a cigarette.  Michel, is a young man who murders a cop after trying to evade him in a stolen car.  He then goes to Paris to try to convince an American student to run to Italy with him.  The woman(who is a journalism student) decide to go with Michel, but eventually realizes its not in her best interest to hang around him and turns him into the police.  Michel tries to escape, but is shot by the police while running in the street.  The film is choppy, using hand held cameras, natural sound and arbitrary editing of sections and then placing them back to add to the jumpiness.  Some critics hated the film due to the subject and the stupidity of the main character, but others wrote positive reviews and soon the film was hailed as a breath of fresh air.

The French New Wave’s influence was eventually seen in Hollywood in the 1970s.  It is hard to imagine Scorsese’s style without the influence of the movement.  Hollywood made their own versions of French New Wave films, but with the Hollywood stamp of higher production.

Class ended at the end of Breathless clip.