HNC Photography, IFC - Coursework, Introduction to Film Culture Blog, Part two - Love and Lust, Project 2 - Love in a time of change
New Wave Cinema a reflection
The exercise says to comment following discourse with fellow students and my research into how successful New Wave Cinema was in exploring human relationships in a time of change. Well, the online community for this course is silent, plus New Wave Cinema is a new area for me. I have spoken to few couple of cinephile friends, and they have roughly the same background knowledge as me. So I have to look at distilling my thoughts from initial research – as to fully explore New Wave would be to dive down a rabbit hole which could take a year to come up from.
“A Bout de Souffle” or “Breathless”, as it is more commonly known in English, by Jean-Luc Goddard is a fascinating film. It is a guess the archetypal New Wave Film. Shot on a handheld camera in a short period – it tells the story of a small-time criminal on the run for the reckless murder of a police officer and his love affair with his American Girlfriend.
This film has a great contemporary feel to it; there is now big a bold about the characters. There is no great unseen motivation behind them. There I a very honest feeling to the film. To quote Roger Ebert, the film depicts how “its narcissistic young heroes are obsessed with themselves and oblivious to the larger society.”
This Candid nature is what New Wave brought to the cinema and the way how we could drop into the lives of relatively ordinary people, who we were living through a time of significant cultural change. New Wave portrayed people mundane lives talking about their lives, their hopes and their sex lives. There was no judgement in how this was presented as they were filmed without the restrictions of the Hays code.
New Wave featured an experimental style, handheld shots and also a lack for formal scripting, which directors were sketching out the film as they went along. They often knew how they wanted the film to look but not what it need to say – and I think helped the development and of the characters. Also, the new technology for high-quality hand holdable camera allow for natural or real feel to the films, which draws the audience into what is happening in the lives of the characters.
Overall, I feel that New Wave was very successful in showing human relationship through the changing times in the same way that the Kitchen Sink drama brought realism into the British Cinema industry.