French New Wave

The influence that French New Wave has had on film is said to be a 'cultural revolution'. Prompting the birth of the auteur, a film director who influences their films so much that they rank as their author. The New Wave approach allowed for a greater sense of flexibility, erasing the boundaries between professional and amateur cinema/fiction and documentary. The low budgets allow exploration of contemporary film, with an unrestricted narrative, giving the director a wider scope to experiment and be creative. The cinematic styles of the French New Wave brought a fresh new look to cinema with improvised dialogue, rapid scene changes and shots that go beyond the common 180 degree axis. The camera was not used to mesmerise the audience with elaborate narrative and intense visuals, but to play with the expectations of cinema. Typical conventions emphasised tight control over the filmmaking process, however, the New Wave deliberately avoided this. They often filmed in public locations with improvised dialogue and plots constructed on the fly. In many ways, it seemed sloppy, but it also captured a vibrancy and spontaneity that no 'quality' film could hope to match.

Key texts:

• À Bout de Souffle (1960).
• Les Mistons (1958). 
• Et Dieu crêa la femme (1956).
• Les Quatre cent coups (1959).
• Jules et Jim (1962).
• Le Boucher (1970).
• La Peau Deuce (1964).
• Charlotte et son Jules (1960).
• Pierrot le Fou (1965).

Filming techniques:

• Natural lighting to achieve a sharp contrast between black and white, often conveying a sense of realism in spontaneous street environments.
• Alternative framing for fast and sensitive shots.
• Self reference, using certain cinematic techniques and director styles.
• Collaboration with cinematographers.
• Reportage (the hidden camera).
• Making deliberate mistakes.
• Liberation of the camera from the tripod, using handheld angles. New Wave filmmakers were helped in shooting by new generations of camera.
• Scenes were often shot in public locations so they could move the camera around very easily, creating long tracking shots and flowing camera movement around a given space. They could also shoot in tight quarters, creating an intimacy that bulkier and more expensive cameras couldn't rival. Many New Wave films use long and extended shots, which hand-held cameras facilitated.

Editing techniques:

• Flash pans.
• Discontinuity of shot.
• Jump cuts are sudden, jarring editing cuts which take place out of sequence or during an unexpected moment. They often involve camera angle changes of less than 30 degrees, which can have a disorienting effect on the viewer. Traditional filmmaking rejected such cuts because they threw the viewer out of the onscreen drama. To New Wave filmmakers, that was precisely the point.
• Modern montage.
• Rapid re-framing, jumping from one shot to another.
• Long takes, using static/mobile or lateral tracking.
• A disregard to continuity editing.
• Breaking the rules...and creating new ones.
• Syncopated editing.

Sound techniques:

• Interior monologues and random comments.
• Modern soundtracks.
• Transcribing, using direct sound and post synchronization (early New Wave films were post synchronized).
• Sacrificing the sound for authenticity.
• French New Wave filmmakers often discarded the use of remixing their sound. Instead, they used a naturalistic soundtrack recorded during the shoot and shown unaltered, despite often featuring mistakes and intrusions. This lent the films a sense of freshness and energy that earlier movies lacked.