MINUTES for 03.26.01 Monday

-Dr. Reimer began the class by commenting on our Black Orpheus homework questions.  Dr. Reimer brought up two points, one regarding the carnival and the other regarding the comparison of Black Orpheus (1959, Camus) and Orfee (1949, Cocteau).

 1) Carnival- Dr. Reimer discussed the role the carnival plays in Camus’s Black Orpheus.  The carnival allows people to get into disguises, but also serves another purpose by demonstrating chaos in life and the irrational.  The carnival allows the audience to negate rules.  The bottom becomes the top and the top becomes the bottom, thus making any sort of rules a non-factor.  On a day to day process people are rational, but during the carnival irrationality rules (anything goes) which complies with the myth of Orpheus.

 2) Black Orpheus compared to Orfee.  Black Orpheus is always set in reality, so the myth is not needed to explain the story, but in Orfee the myth is needed.  Cocteau (Orfee) took the myth, fleshed the myth out, and set the story in Paris, France.  Camus (Black Orpheus) takes a story, gives the characters names from the myth, and has similar events to the myth that could still happen in reality.

 1959-mid 1960’s  - French New Wave

 Three main directors of the French New Wave (All three came out with a new film in 1960)

1) Jean-Luc Godard (1930-)- Breathless

2) Alain Resnais (1922-)- Hiroshima mon amour

3) Francois Truffaut (1932-1984)- 400 Blows also known as Les Quatre cents coups

 -All three directors took a different approach to film, BUT all reacted against the established French cinema at the time.  French cinema at the time looked good, but said little.  French New Wave produced films that were not polished (little money was available), but wanted to make films that were honest.  The directors of the French New Wave obviously borrowed from those who went before them, but they borrowed and took another direction.  Godard’s films are political.  Resnais’s films are literary and philosophical.  Truffaut’s films deal with relationships on an honest level.

 RESNAIS-  His first film was a documentary: Night and Fog, (also known as Nuit et brouillard, 1955) which is the first film to deal with the holocaust in Germany.  Resnais deals with the French role in their collaboration with Germany.  Documentary footage was taken inside concentration camps.  Resnais talked with survivors and guards.  The French government rejected the documentary and ultimately altered the film by changing the French Police’s uniform. 

-Throughout Resnais films he deals with similar themes such as memory and how we remember (especially those things that we do not want to remember). 

-Hiroshima mon amour- After Night and Fog Resnais was asked to make a documentary on Hiroshima, Japan (Hiroshima mon amour). 

 Plot summary- Resnais did not make a pure documentary film, but embeds the documentary portions within the film.  This style is totally different as the film opens up with a couple talking in bed about the bomb dropping on Hiroshima.  What Resnais does is contrast an act of love with an act of destruction.  The female in the movie is French and the male is Japanese (both characters speak French).  The female character had her lover shot in front of her because he was German.  The male is the only surviving member of his family (who perished when the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima).

 Clip- The clip we saw in class was from the beginning of the film.  The clip shows glimpses of the couple.   We never see their faces just parts of their bodies, but we are shown the couple enough times to understand what is happening. While in bed the female describes the bombing of Hiroshima through a museum that she visited.  The Japanese male character keeps telling her that she has not experienced any of the things she believes she has, while she continually refutes his claims by saying she has.  The film demonstrates the universal suffering of the Japanese verses the individual suffering of the female (who had her lover shot before her eyes b/c he was the “enemy” aka German).

 GODARD - Breathless (A bout de Souffle).  Godard makes a film about the youth of France (ca. 24-25 years old) underclass.  The hero of the film is a “young punk” who sees himself as Humphrey Bogart.  Dr. Reimer states that Breathless is well thought out. 

 Plot summary: The young man (Michel played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) murders a policeman (partly by accident).  He then runs to Paris to pick up an old flame (Patricia).  Michel wants to convince her to run away to Italy with him.  Patricia is an American student who wants to be a journalist.  She realizes that maybe it wouldn’t be best to go off with him, but she is drawn to him.  At the end she turns him in to save herself.  What Godard has done is make a film that is choppy.  Godard uses hand held cameras, natural sound, and long takes (which he takes out portions giving the film a jumpy quality).  Breathless helped change the way Hollywood made films in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s (example Five Easy Pieces).  An old formula is used and reinvented.

 Clip-  The clip is of the last five minutes of the film.  The clip begins right after Patricia has turned Michel over to the police (which are on there way).  Michel eventually runs into the street and is shot dead by the French police.  His last breath is smoke filled giving the audience a visual of his breathlessness.  Michel also closes his own eyes making a reference to film and to the fact that he is all alone.  Breathless is self reflective in that it continually refers to itself and film, an example is the Otto Preminger (1906-1986) film playing at the theater (it is Preminger who discovered Jean Seberg, the actress who played Patricia and also starred in a few Preminger films including Saint Joan, 1957 and Bonjour Tristesse, 1958).

 -next class period we will see a clip from Hollywood’s version of Breathless (1983 directed by Jim McBride), starring Richard Gere.