French New Wave

French new wave

The French New Wave has been very important part of filming and has a very big history behind it, it was a French revolution which was a completely different type of filming that the audiences watched, which made them interested in this, that’s why it’s been grown so huge.

It all started off with a blanket term created by critics from a small group of French filmmakers in 1950’s and 1960’s, who wrote for Cahiers du Cinema, which was a French film journal. These critics were Cahiers included Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette, and a few others, which all have played major roles in the beginnings of New Wave cinema. They struck out to make films with their own voice, influenced mostly by Hollywood, imparticular directors such as Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray, who were previously identified as ‘auteurs’. According to many filmmakers French New Wave is regarded as one of the most influential movements ever to take place in cinema. Although it was no less intellectual in the approach to film-making, the generation was raised on the drama and excitement of Hollywood movies. When audience started to watch these types of films, the French filmmakers changed the styles and themes completely, because they wanted to create something different and show how mis-en-scene can be used differently and more effectively; they’ve done this by showing the different types of edits and camera movements in their films that they’ve created. Their aim was to get their film-maing philosophy across to as many people as possible, but their budgets were minimal. Their technique was to create fragmented, discontinuous editing and long takes. Hey used techniques such as jump cuts, flashbacks, voice overs and symbolism which were all mashed up together. The different films which were created as French new wave were; Le Beau Serge (1958) by Claude Chabrol, The Lovers (1958) by Louis Malle and Paris Belongs to Us (1960) by Jacques Rivette.

I wanted to look at French New Wave, because I felt that by learning about such a big history in the filmmaking would make me understand different types of filmmaking. I think it would be possible to use French New Wave to make a thriller, however our group is still undecided on the type on thriller that we’ll be creating so we wanted to look into French New Wave. There are some techniques from French New Waves which are still used in today’s filmmaking such as hand help camera’s which appear in many films. This is definitely one of the movements we’ll think of using in our thriller.

Anastazja Stanowska