The French New Wave and its Paralells

The French New Wave was an innovative time in film. After having watched Breathless, I realize why. While it is important to note that the content of the dialogue is something to be discussed, what struck me most were its stylistic elements. After all, the French New Wave was an aesthetic movement in cinema.

One of my favorite aspects of Breathless was the jump cuts. The jump cuts were a great and spontaneous way to portray exactly what the scenes were showing us, but without trying too hard. Essentially, what is great about them is that the director is able to collage different shots taken of the scene, and still let out the same message. This very much reminded me of Un Chien Andalou. For instance, the representation of a car accident in Un Chien Andalou is just a shot of a car that jump cuts to the shot of a car with a person right next to it while in Breathless, the character is just running and the sound of a gunshot jump cuts to him just ending up on the ground. While Un Chien Andalou came first, I think it is important to give credit to Breathless for putting this in the mainstream. This portrayal of incidents that should be somewhat gore-filled could just be indicative of what people could handle in film at the time. After all, All Quiet on the Western Front was a shockingly gorey and violent film at its time, but to us now we just see it as PG-13.

Another great stylistic element was the usage of real time. To me, real time is a way of getting a certain raw feeling from a scene, because you know that it’s done without editing, and your attention really must be kept throughout the whole scene. This was something apparent to me while watching this music video for Francoise Hardy’s song "Tous les Garcons et les Filles".

I had watched this and thought it was so stylistically different from modern videos and I really thought to myself that this was innovative. Eventually I came to the realization that this song and music came out in the 1960’s, which is exactly around the time of the French New Wave. So with that, we can make the conclusion that the French New Wave influenced more than just film. However, I do want to make mention of the final scene in Truffaut's the 400 Blows, which was all in real time--not only is that my favorite example, but I really feel like it provokes a great emotion that is REAL because we see it happening without editing at all.

As far as plot content, I will make mention of one thing. The movie Breathless approaches the ending in a huge event happening, but then just a feeling of __________. What's great about that is that it's left up to the audience to decide how they want to interpret the ending. It could either be hopeful(which everyone usually wants it to be), tragic, or really it could just be a sense of acceptance(which showcases the existentialist theme from these movies). This reminded me much of the ending to Michel Gondry'sEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The end lines of "okay." really portray what these film makers want from the audience--for them to figure it out themselves, because this is life.

FIN.