GENRE RESEARCH Historical context

French New Wave (nouvelle vague)
In the 1950s and 60's a post-war movement began in France, lead by writer's for a French magazine Cahiers du Cinema such as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard (A Bout de Souffle) and Claude Chabrol . It encompassed a lot of documentary style film techniques in order to challenge traditional film styles and make audiences acutely aware that they are watching a media text which has been artificially constructed, as a backlash against the influence of Nazi propaganda.

A Bout de Souffle poster

The idea of an anti-hero emerged form a lot of these films, having protagonists be morally ambiguous and focusing more on an aspect of audience identification rather than aspiration.


Some conventions of the movement found through research:

• Low budget
• pretty much all indie productions
• shot on site because of this (people's houses or public locations)
• cast was often people that the director already knew
• transportable equipment
• e.g. in Godard's A Bout de Souffle a scene shot on the Champs Elysees used a shopping trolley for a tracking shot
• improvisation (of lines, and spontaneity in filming)
• Themes:
• existentialism (often criticisms of organized religion, or nihilistic protagonists)
• gritty (disillusionment, abortion, rape, violence, poverty)
• Jean-Luc Godard did extensive research into Marxism and it is present in some of his films
• Techniques
• long takes (film reel was expensive)
• hand-held cameras
• fast cuts
• breaks of convention (e.g. the 180 degree rule) to subvert expectations
• jump cuts
• character asides
• breaking eye line matches
• Discontinuity editing (more on this in prelim blog post)
• Other:
• Lots of intertextual references
• e.g. A Bout de Souffle has quotes form Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner; music from Bach and Mozart, and lots of film posters as a part of set dressing
• They were black and white films, a lot of them made for television due to low budget
• The progression of time was often close to that of real life
• Cleo 5 to 7 follows 2 hours in the life of an actress/singer as she awaits the results of a medical test, however the narrative is divided into chapters follow her state of mind

  

  Cleo from 5 to 7 screenshot

• Open ended narratives
• some scenes are shown more than once but from the points of views of different characters - showing both the objective and subjective events

...
British New Wave
British New Wave (1959-63) was inherently similar to French New Wave, as it was the spreading of the movement. Because of this most of the techniques used were the same, but some notable differences:

• Often had a focus on working class struggles, particularly those in the North of England
• e.g. Room at the Top has a protagonist from Yorkshire (though the actor's accent is inconsistent at best) 
• Heavier focus on relationship and social drama (hence the name 'kitchen sink drama/realism)
• e.g. Billy Liar follows the life of a man with three girlfriends
• e.g. The L-shaped Room uses the social interactions between the protagonist and her neighbors to explore social conventions and challenge social status quos