Week 3: Alphaville and New Wave Cinema

Readings:
The Fench New Wave was the introduction of a new form of film proclaming the rejection of a traditional french commercial cinema.
A group of conventions were consistently used in the French New Wave films like, for example: Jump cuts, shooting on location, natural lighting, improvised dialogue and plotting, direct sound recording and long take.
The French New Wave seemed to have an interest in deconstructing (gangster, romance, musical) while ultimately ending up in tragedy-land.
Many of the film from the New French Wave became popular and critically acclaimed worldwide.
The five filmmakers who came from the Cahiers du cinema (Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rivette and Rohmer) were prolific: in the years between 1959 and 1966, the peak of the New Wave, they made 32 films.

The three initial films of the new wave:

Truffaut: The 400 Blows: semi-autobiographical film: unsentimental but poetic story of a teenage delinquent who runs away from home and finds life on the streets a rough challenge.

Godard: Breathless: Godard has been the most influential and remembered director of the new wave.Many of his films still hold up today.
Apparition of the dziga vertov group the films then started to become increasingly inaccessible most of them remained unfinished or were refused showings
Godard - simultaneously exasperating and brilliant, self-important and important.

Resnais: Hiroshima, Mon Amour: the most inventive of all early New Wave works in terms of structure. What was different with Resnais was his use of a strong screenplay using less improvisation and working closely with a separate writer.

Lecture:
Alphaville

Tutorial:
at the begining of the tutorial we spent time talking about what hapened during the lecture and what we thought about the movie A lphaville. Alphaville is a pretty strong movie about the use of mind control with the intentions of creating a utopian society.After that we improved our blog by adding some more options; like for example we added a contact list. So at first we had to go around the room to get to know one another and get their adresses but at the end it has been decided that it would be easier to create a page on the discussion board to get blog’s addresses. It’s giving us the opprotunity to check what other people are doing and where they are standing compare to me. During the class we had time to customise a litlle more our blog so I spent the rest of the class time doing some work on my blog trying to make it more interesting and easy to read and use.