European Cinema minutes

01-14-02

In this class, we continued to discuss the fundamentals of film, to give an introduction for people new to studying film.  We discussed further the inadvisability of making blanket generalizations about French film, Hollywood film, and so on.  Nonetheless, Dr. Reimer pointed out that some groups of films can be serialized as “French films” or “Hollywood films.”  To illustrate this, we saw the final segment of Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard, 1959), a French film that is part of a group of films done in a very existential style that was new and specifically French at first.  We discussed some of the techniques Godard used, a few of which were: very choppy film editing, sometimes not only because of a minimal budget, but also as a device; facial close-ups of the protagonists to show their isolation; a long chase scene that showed, among other things, the trap-like inevitability of death; and as unlikable a hero as had ever been managed, to bring the audience into the realm of existential isolation as well.  We then compared the film with the later American version (Jim McBride, 1983).  The story of this second film was essentially the same, but the existential principle was nearly erased from it.  As in the original version, facial close-ups were used, though perhaps not to show isolation.  As Dr. Reimer pointed out, some cultural conventions intervened to make some changes, as, for example, in the end, when McBride’s protagonist grabs the gun and turns toward the police with obvious intent, while Godard’s protagonist did not seem to have any intention of using the gun he picked up.  The difference is dictated by the fact that an American audience would not like for the police to shoot and kill an unarmed man, or a man who has picked up the gun, but has only innocent motivations in doing so.  Similarly, much of the emotional ambiguity present in Godard’s film is absent in McBride’s version, as the original coldness of the film would not have appealed to an American audience, and would have been considered very odd.

Finally, we looked at the opening credits and first part of the first scene of Three Men and a Cradle (Coline Serreau, 1985) and Three Men and a Baby (Leonard Nimoy, 1987) for comparison.  Dr. Reimer charged us with the duty of thinking about the cultural setting of these two films, and how that setting was portrayed, for discussion on Wednesday.