French New Wave essays

French New Wave essays The French New Wave was a movement that lasted between 1959 to 1964. It all started with the Cinematheque Francois, an underground organization that would regularly show older films from around the world. This beget the cine-club, and by the 1954 there were 100,000 members in 200 clubs. From these clubs several magazines were created, the most famous of these were LEcran Francois, La Revue du Cinema, Postif, and the world known Cahiers du Cinema. One of the two most influential people during this time was Alexandre Astruc who declared that, the cinema is becoming a means of expression like the other arts before it, especially painting and the novel. It is no longer a spectacle, a diversion equivalent to the old boulevard theater...it is becoming, little by little, a visual language, i.e. a medium in which and by which an artist can express his thoughts, be they abstract or whatever, or in which he can communicate his obsessions as accurately as he can today in essay or novel. What Astruc was saying , was that the cinema was now as personal as paintings and literature, instead of just a show. The second and most influential of the two was Andr Bazin, who like Astruc believed that the cinema was equal to the novel. Bazin believed in the long take and the deep focus over the Soviet Montage, composition in depth is seen as egalitarian in the sense that everything in the frame exists with equal clarity, thereby giving the spectator a choice: our eyes are free to roam from foreground to background and around. It is closer to the way we perceive in off screen life, and it reintroduces ambiguity into the structure of the image. Bazin also championed the Italian Neorealism movement, for its revolutionary humanism, and its on location shooting, improvisational style, use of non actors, and for its long takes. In 1950s Andr Bazin founded Cahier du Cinema, a magazin...