Reminder that Tuesday, June 11^th we take our midterm examination.

Mr. Reimer reviewed the website.  He explained that one set of minutes is posted and the remaining 3 sets he has received will be posted later today or tomorrow afternoon. 

Leave your name off the set of minutes you complete.  Minutes may be returned to you for changes and Mr. Reimer may make changes to the minutes prior to posting.

Turning in your set of minutes automatically results in 100 points added to your grade.  All students should compare their notes with the minutes posted on the website to avoid incorrect information.

Mr. Reimer reviewed www.INMD.com the INMD (International Movie Database) reminding us that online reviews go into little depth but are a good starting point.

The first free writes were returned to students.  Free writes usually receive high grades but poor grammar or spelling and a lack of depth or exploration result in lost points.  Mr. Reimer will discuss any questions before or after class.

The class has 2^nd free writes due on Thursday, June 6^th on any film of Ingmar Bergman.  In the library you can use their database, Jasmine, by clicking on author and typing in Bergman, Ingmar.  There are about 15 of his works available in the library.  You may borrow a copy from a video store or from Mr. Reimer’s collection that he will bring to class on Tuesday, June 4^th.  Ingmar runs gammed early and then in his 40’s and 50’s his work, such as Wild Strawberries, 7^th Seal and The Silence, are more philosophical.  He is highly critical of religion and his work is that of  psychological studies.  His work is dark, brooding, depressing and pessimistic.  He is a genius of film history and highly influential on other directors such as Woody Allen and numerous Europeans.

French New Wave starts in 1959.  Unlike most countries, the French film industry has competed in France with Hollywood since the 1920’s.  The French insist on using the French language, French culture, French countryside and French traditions.  They are cinematic enough to compete with us. The French create Poetic Realism which is Realism filtered through the director and each director has his/her identifiable and specific style.  The French produce a higher quality product that is art cinema rather than globally having an appeal to everyone.

It all began in the late 1930’s and 1940’s.  The quality of film did not suffer due to the war but it resulted in many people leaving Europe for Hollywood, eg. Renoir.  After the war, there was a backlog of movies entering and flooding France making it hard for moviemakers to get onto their feet.  By the 1950’s movies looked good but much like the Hollywood style they did not say much to the audience.  Production values were extraneous.  These were the same types of movies of the 1920’s and 1930’s that have an empty quality; void of ideas and avoiding current issues. 

Then, the Cinema Notebooks criticized French Film and praised U.S. directors such as Hawks, Hitchcock and Ford which resulted in a group of young directors deciding in 1959 that they wanted to return to the author type of film of the 1920’s and 1930’s and to do so they would use Hollywood as their model but they would turn things upside down.  They had minimal funds and so they were critical of big budgets and high production values.  They were determined to use contemporary French issues and to pay special attention to gearing the productions toward the 20 and 30 year olds.

The first clip we viewed was that of Breathless.  The oldest person working on Breathless was 29 years old.  The highly influential director, Jean-Luc Godard, created low budget, in-your-face film.  He established a type of film that critics did not receive favorably using a handheld camera and natural light.  The natural light results in scenes that are overlit or underlit.  His editing is bazaar; he snipped out pieces of film and then stuck them together to create a jumpy or ‘breathless’ composition.  His characters are unlikable.  This hero, Del Mondo(actor)/Michelle (character’s name) is a young punk who shoots a police officer in the first sequence and is then on the run.  The character postures himself around Humphrey Bogard using a cigarette and in pose.  He smokes constantly and even let’s out his last cigarette smoke residue at death which references the name, Breathless.  He attempts to get money from a girlfriend and while her back is turned he steals it from her and leaves to pursue an American girlfriend.  The American and our hero intend to escape to Italy.  The American is from Iowa (Midwest U.S) and is a budding journalist.  She views this scenario as a romantic liaison but with a bit of time realizes that it will adversely affect her career so she turns him in and the cops shoot him.  Throughout the movie there are references of Hollywood and the production is stylized after U.S. Gangster movies and 1940’s Bogart movies.  The film is set in France and our hero purposefully speaks about liking France and that if you do not like France then it’s ‘too bad for you’.  In the final scene Michelle closes his own eyes prior to death which is a cliché of American films and here emphasizes that we are alone in this world and we even have to close our eyes when we die.  The content appeals to what contemporary young people sought.  We are supposed to see the seams of this movie that emphasizes the Socio-political message.  It appears more dated today than it would have 60 years ago due to fashions and black and white but although the hard-to-relate-to characters, editing and camerawork are common today, they were new at the time.  The movie is playful.  The critics response was that you need to be able to like someone in a movie and they did not like the low budget ‘feel’ of the movie.  6 months later French New Wave started to influence French cinema and Hollywood; it continued to do so through the first half of the 1960’s with choppy editing, handheld cameras and youthful, not always sympathetic characters eg. Easy Rider.  Godard’s films remain political until the late 1960’s.  He becomes ‘preachy’ with less film, a diminishing story and increases the distancing of the audience from the film.  From the late 1970’s to the mid-1980’s he returns to feature films and omits political extremism.

Alain Resnois is highly political.  We viewed Hiroshima Mon Amour of 1959 and Last Year at Marienbal of 1961.  He had created a documentary about the concentration camps and the associated memories, willing to forget and pain of recall.  Thereafter he was asked to do a documentary on Hiroshima but he wanted to do a narrative so he created Hiroshima Mon Amour which is a film where the characters produce a film about the Hiroshima bombing.  This film was a very new type of film at the time and shows horrific images.  The characters are She, a French Woman and He, a Japanese Man.  They meet in Hiroshima where She is visiting and He works as an architect and have an affair.  They talk about her day at the museum looking at the horrific Hiroshima bomb images.  She insists she can feel the victim’s pain but He insists she cannot.  We see flashbacks showing that she had an affair with a German in World War 2 and when her village found out they killed her lover and shut her up in a basement so she has experienced personal pain.  He says they are speaking of universal pain.  He was away when the bombing killed his family.  The film reminds us that to forget would be wrong.  There is no resolution; she returns to her husband and he to his wife.  The film is an examination of a critical junction in the life of coming to terms with past suffering.  The camera moves forward as though entering memories and searching.  The conversation of death and destruction contrasts with and seems very inappropriate for the act of lovemaking.  We are reminded that it is not over and this tragedy could occur again which was of great concern to people of the 1950’s.

The Last Year at Marienbad is about remembering and knowing what we remember from our past.  A man kills another woman’s husband at Marienbad and we are left wondering if it is the present or a flashback to the past, if the affair did or did not occur, if the murder did or did not occur and if the affair was or was not discovered.  This is a confusing and complex screenplay with very little storyline.  This production is about mood, ideas and camera movement related to the idea of remembering and forgetting.  The camera constantly moves forward and there is a lot of repetition of narration.  This is emphasized and reflected by the opening scene’s repetition of décor patterns in the spa.  The camera moving through the corridors of the organic style of this Baroque structure is related to that of the mind and remembering.  The camerawork, the building and the narration reinforce the value of remembering and not knowing if we remember correctly.

French New Wave features much experimentation.  Chris Marker created the half hour experimental film La Jetee 1961 which is the precursor of 12 Monkeys.  The adventure is that of going back to the past to correct a situation in the current destroyed world that was caused by a cataclysmic event.  In the 1950’s and 1960’s such an event would have been an atomic bombing.  This film uses stills, music and the camera technique used for the stills to make us follow and wonder what is next.  The young boy in the film witnesses his own death and the existential phrase, ‘There aren’t many of us who get to witness our own death’ is used.  The French New Wave continues until the mid to late 1970’s.