Return to World Cinema syllabus
Updated 27 September 2006
English 212, Section 3: World Cinema
Week 5: 25 September
Professor: Don Larsson
6:00-6:15 Quiz 2 (Japanese Film)
6:15-6:45 The French New Wave and Jean-Luc Godard
8:15-8:25 Break
8:25-9:30 Discussion of Band of Outsiders and Godard
The French Film Industry before the New Wave
(See Wexler book, Chapters 6 and 12 and other sources for details)
Pre-World War II
French film industry began
almost same time as in
1895: Louis and Auguste Lumiere screen one-minute short films to
a café audience in
camera/projector
1890s: Georges Melies creates hundreds of short films using studio-
created “special effects”
Emil Cohl creates early animated films
Alice Guy-Blache becomes first major woman director
1900s: French film industry begins to be dominated by Pathe Bros. and
Gaumont studios
1920s: Heyday of experimental films, often influenced by Surrealism and
Dada:
§ Entr’acte (Rene Clair)
§
Un Chien Andalou/An
Andalusian Dog (Luis Bunuel and
§ Zero for Conduct (Jean Vigo)
“Art Cinema”/Impressionism:
§ Germaine Dullac—The Smiling Mdme. Beudet
§ Abel Gance—Napoleon (wide-screen process)
1930s: Rise of “Poetic Realism”
§ Clair experiments with sound in Le Million and A nous la liberte
§
§ Maurice Pagnol: The Baker’s Wife, the Fanny trilogy
§
Marcel Carne: Quai des Brumes/Port of
Shadows, Le Jour se leve, Children of
§ Jean Renoir: Grand Illusion, Rules of the Game
1939-1945:
World War II—
and
region controlled by pro-Nazi government in
Post World War II
§ French film industry tries to maintain “tradition of quality” with mainstream
§ productions
§
American films seen in
§ Film clubs form to view and discuss French and foreign films
§ Andre Bazin co-founds magazine Cahiers du cinema (Cinema Notebooks)
§ Bazin begins series of articles that re-define cinematic value in terms of realism, long takes, staging in depth, etc.
§ Handful of independent directors chart their own course
§ Jacques Tati—Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, Playtime
o Gently satirizes modern society with gags and interplay of visual and sound elements
§ Max Ophuls—La Ronde, The Earrings of Mdme. de . . . , Lola Montez
o Dramas of social hypocrisy, marked by extensive use of moving camera
§ Robert Bresson—Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette, Balthazar
o Distanced but sympathetic view of human fraility, marked by shots and soundtrack that require close viewer attention
The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague)
§ Lasted from about 1959-1967
§ Movement united only by interest in creating new, personal cinema
§ Emerged from group of young critics at Cahiers du cinema
§ Made possible by government financing for low-budget independent films to meet production quotas and attract new audiences
§ Influenced by rediscovery of Renoir and American film, Italian Neorealism
§ The politique des auteurs/”author policy”/”auteur theory”
§ First proclaimed in Cahiers article by Francois Truffaut
§ Extolled the director’s role as film “author”
§ Included director-writers like Gance, Renoir, Tati, and Bresson
§
Also included American directors from
§
Popularized in
§ Often participated in and made references to each other in early films
Major New Wave Directors besides Godard
Francois Truffaut—The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim
Claude Chabrol—Le Beau serge, The Cousins, Les Bonnes femmes
Eric Rohmer—concerned with balance between intellect and emotion
§ “Six Moral Tales” include My Night at Maude’s, Claire’s Knee, Love in the Afternoon
Jacques Rivette—long complex narratives, dealing the operations of Fate
§
Jacques Demy—Lola, The Umbrellas of
§ Deliberately stylized and artificial settings and costumes, marked use of music and singing
Other French filmmakers associated with or influenced by the New Wave
§
“
§
Alain Resnais: older, began in documentary (Night and Fog):
interested in psychology, memory and perception:
§ Agnes Varda: Cleo from Five to Seven, Le Bonheur, Vagabond
§ Mainstream directors—
§ Louis Malle—The Lovers, Zazie dans le metro, Gallows to the Elevator
§ Claude LeLouch—A Man and a Woman
Influence of New Wave
Opened
doors in many countries to innovative techniques in filmmaking, including
Repeat: Differences between Japanese and French “New Waves”
|
|
|
|
Film production backed by major studios |
Film production independently financed, often low-budget |
|
Major directors had served as apprentices to old masters like Mizoguchi and Ozu |
Major directors were originally film critics |
|
Films often shot in wide-screen processes and color |
Films often made with hand-held cameras and black-and-white |
|
Films not often seen
outside of |
Films became widely seen and discussed in West |
Both movements
§ worked in a wide range of styles and subject matter
§ openly voiced political and social criticism (although Japanese films were usually more political)
§
last for about 5-10 years (
§ Most directors eventually quit studios and went independent
Jean-Luc Godard
§
Swiss by nationality, born in
§ Most innovative, radical (in style and politics), and unpredictable of New Wave
§ Breathless (released 1960), along with The 400 Blows, grabs critics’ attention
§ Prolific early output—nearly two films per year
§ “I don’t make movies; I make cinema”
§ Deliberately distances viewer and reminds us that we are watching a film, but the distance grows stronger in later films as Godard becomes more overtly political
§ Incorporates references to literature, art and popular culture; later films use signs, sounds and images with no apparent connection to the story
§ In later 1960s, increasingly identified with Maoist student radicals
§ Eventually formed “Dziga Vertov Collective” with Jean-Pierre Gorin
§ Later modulated political tone, but continued to critique society, politics and the production of images
Some Major Godard Films:
Early New Wave Films (1960-1965)
Breathless
A Woman Is a Woman
My Life to Live
The Little Soldier
Les Carabiniers
Contempt
A Married Woman
Alphaville
Pierrot le fou
Earlier Political Films (1965-1968)
Masculine-Feminine
Two or Three Things I Know about Her
La Chinoise
Weekend
Sympathy for the Devil/One + One
Le Gai savoir
Dziga Vertov Films (1968-1972)
A Film Like the Others
Pravda
Wind from the East
Tout va bien/Everything’s fine
Letter to Jane
Later Films (1972-Present)
Passion
First Name: Carmen
Hail, Mary
2 X 50 Years of French Cinema
Notre Musique
Bande a part/Band of Outsiders
Director: Godard; Screenplay: Godard, from Fool’s Gold by Dolores Hitchens; Cinematography: Raoul Coutard; Music: Michel Legrand
Cast: Anna Karina (Odile), Claude Brasseur (Arthur Rimbaud); Sami Frey (Franz); Louise Colpeyn (Mdme. Victoria, Odile’s aunt)
Summary: Arthur and Franz are two small-time crooks who become acquainted with Odile, a student who lives with her aunt on an island in the river. Believing that the aunt has a large amount of money hidden in her house, the three plan a robbery. As they work toward the robbery, they fall in and out of love with each other, read newspapers, sit in coffeehouses, read the newspaper, tour the Louvre, dance, ride the metro, and sing, among other things.
Questions to think about:
1. What are the characters of Arthur and Franz like? What drives their actions and their personalities? Does it matter that they both love Odile?
2. How does Odile’s personality contrast with that of the two men? Does her character make a statement about women in general?
3. What is the effect of the voice-over narrator? How much can we trust the narrator’s words in comparison to what we see?
4. What is the point of the delays and digressions in the plot?
5. How does Godard remind us that we are in fact watching a movie? Why?
DISCUSSION SUMMARY + SOME ADDITIONAL NOTES ON BAND OF OUTSIDERS.
The Characters: Franz and Arthur have names that reflect famous experimental authors of the past (the Bohemian modernist Franz Kafka, author of “The Metamorphosis” and The Trial and who looked a bit like Sami Frey, who plays Franz, and Arthur Rimbaud, the young French Symbolist poet who shocked society with his poems The Drunken Boat and A Season in Hell, as well as with his personal life). But Franz and Arthur lack the depth of either author. Even though they are both interested in Odile mainly as a sex object and because there is money hidden in her aunt’s house, they are not terribly serious about anything they do. Their general rootlessness and sense of alienation also suggest the anti-heroes of such French Existentialist novels as Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea or Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Even then, they seem to lack the introspection of those characters, although Franz seems to be a bit more serious and reserved than Arthur, but we do hear them quoting some surprising sources in literature—the French Surrealist author Raymond Queneau, whose novel Odile provides the heroine’s name, and even Edgar Allen Poe (when Franz talks about reading an American story about a detective looking for a letter that was hidden in plain sight—a reference to Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter”).
In contrast, Odile seems more innocent and naïve than either of the two men, but she’s attracted to them, especially the rougher and more aggressive Arthur, and she agrees to help their plans to rob her aunt’s house. At the classroom, she and Athur openly flirt with each other, exchanging glances and notes like a couple of high school students. If Odile, has romantic notions about love, she also seems able to empathize more strongly with others. The best example is the scene in the Metro, where she sings the song about loneliness and isolation, ending with the words that “I am also one of you.” One thing that ties all three of these characters together is how they’ve been influenced by popular culture. Franz and Arthur play at Western-style gunfights (like the legendary one between Sheriff Pat Garrett and the outlaw Billy the Kid, in a scene that foreshadows Arthur’s real death later), and Odile leads the two men in dancing The Madison, a popular dance of the time, in the bar.
The Narrator: The voice-over narration (provided by Godard himself) offers an ongoing description of events and commentary on the characters. At first, it seems like he plays the role of the “omniscient” (“all-knowing”) narrator that can be found in many novels and some films, as talks about what the characters are seeing and thinking as well as what they are doing. But the narrator actually serves to distance us from the characters, to reduce our normal tendency to identify with them. The details of action that he describes do not exactly match what we see the characters do, and there is no way to confirm that the characters are actually thinking or feeling the thoughts and emotions that he describes. We begin to realize that both the characters and images and the narration have been placed in the film for us to look at and listen to and that we should not necessarily trust what we see more than what we hear or vice-versa. In addition, the narrator’s words, like some of the dialogue spoken by the characters, is actually taken from literary sources. This is another example of the cultural cross-referencing that occurs throughout the film.
The Plot: The mechanics of the plot follow the lines of the American crime fiction novel, Fool’s Gold by Dolores Hitchens, on which the film is based, and its basic elements are pretty familiar to readers of crime fiction or viewers of American films (especially the films noirs of the 1940s and 1950s): Two men lead an innocent girl astray to pull off a robbery, but the planned crime does not go the way they planned and one dies while the other two escape, with far less money than they had hoped to steal. But the plot is not the point of the film, as Godard pulls the rug out from under our expectations continually. Early on, the narrator summarizes events for “latecomers” with a series of words—“Three weeks earlier. A house by the river. A pile of money. An English class. A romantic girl.” We can more or less fill in the connections between these phrases ourselves. Parts of the story (the full string of events related by cause and effect) are avoided or just referred to. For instance, the connection between Arthur’s uncle and the robbery isn’t very clear because we do not have a scene where Franz exposes the plot to the uncle, getting him involved. We see Franz in bed alone and Arthur and Odile together but that’s all that confirms that the two have slept together. In the meantime, there are many digressions and diversions that linger on the characters doing nothing that directly connects to the robbery itself. At the end, the narrator says, “My story ends here, like in a pulp novel, in that superb moment when nothing weakens, nothing wears away, nothing wanes,” and promises us a sequel in CinemaScope and Technicolor. In a way, the unimportance of the plot itself is suggested by the classroom scene where the teacher reads phrases from Romeo and Juliet with great passion, but the phrases themselves have been taken randomly from the play and do not connect together.
Digressions and Diversions: Most of the actual plot centered on the robbery does not fill more than perhaps twenty minutes or so of the film’s ninety-minute running time. The rest deals with Arthur, Franze and Odile talking, waiting, dancing, etc. At times, these moments seem to provide commentary on the pointlessness of so much modern life, as when Arthur and Franz read lurid newspaper articles while they wait for Odile. An even better example is “minute of silence” at the bar (actually 37 seconds)—the soundtrack itself goes totally silent, and the scene suggests how difficult the passing of time can be—whether in a bar or in the movies—when nothing seems to be happening. The dancing of The Madison really does nothing more to advance the plot than the minute of silence, but it is enthralling to watch, and Godard’s narrator offers again words to explain what the characters are thinking (maybe!). The race through the Louvre—perhaps the greatest art museum in the world—is just another way of killing time, in which all of that classic art is a simple backdrop. On the other hand, Godard also reminds us that there is a world beyond the boundaries of what these characters say and do. An early example is when the three stop near Odile’s aunt’s house and we hear not only noises of building and construction in the background but something that sounds like a roaring beast. A little later, we see Odile actually taking some meat to a tiger from a circus or carnival that is apparently housed near her place. Why is there a tiger there? Why not? (And it’s also a reference to a film by Godard’s fellow New Wave director Claude Chabrol!)
Quoting: Aside from surrealist literature, the film is littered with quotes from and references to other sources. When Franz and Odile make their fingers dance on the tabletop at the bar, they refer to a famous scene in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, and the final shot of Franz and Odile on the ship refer to another Chaplin film, The Emigrant. Besides the scene with the tiger, there are many other references to New Wave films. Franz whistles a few bars and later we hear a juke box playing the song “If It Takes Forever, I Will Wait for You,” a hit single that came from Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The song and music for that film were composed by Michel LeGrande, the composer for Band of Outsiders. Arthur and Odile walk at night past a shop named Nouvelle Vague (French for “New Wave”). Franz says that Odile has “soft skin” (the title of a film by Truffaut). And so on. More of these references are explained in the “Visual Glossary” in the “Loot” section of the DVD that will be on reserve at the library. “People in life quote as they please,” Godard said, “so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore, I show people quoting, merely making sure that what they quote pleases me.”
So What’s the Point?: If the references to American films, pulp fiction, and other New Wave directors are typical of the New Wave in general in the early 1960s, Band of Outsiders also deals with films are typical of Godard alone. One concern that of individual isolation. The American critic Paul Kael called scene where the characters dance The Madison, “a dance of sexual isolation.” At the end of the film, as they drive away, Franz wonders how people can be in love and yet never come together. The fact that we exist inside our own bodies and our own minds and can never fully escape that state or merge with others is something that Godard—in very different ways—has wrestled with throughout his career. Another thing that he has wrestled with is the meaning of images. Arthur and Franz imitate what they’ve seen on the screen. Great paintings in the Louvre are just a backdrop. There are even hints of the way that Godard will increasingly focus on the glut of images that we get through media and popular culture in his later films. Movies are just images and sounds, and they have the power to draw us in but they are also totally artificial in their way. So Godard gives us a happy ending—Franz “proves” his love to Odile with the little love test she carries, and we will have a sequel in color and widescreen. (And Godard’s next film, A Woman Is A Woman, while not a sequel did turn out be in widescreen and color, and musical to boot! Band of Outsiders is another stage in Godard’s long love-hate relationship with the movies—loving their possibilities and hating how often they serve only to comfort us with the familiar.