n utilised in their own works. Though “the young French cinema indirectly reproached Hollywood’s long-established narratives and restricted storyline subterfuges” (Lanzoni, 206), the French New Wave directors also had a longstanding appreciation for directorial greats like Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang and Orson Welles. Each film was an exercise in honouring great filmmakers, and any other hero of the director: writers, great thinkers and even Hollywood actors, through countless references in style, mise-en-scene or even dialogue. Roy Armes notes this constant intertextuality, and how it was in essence, a way for these educated artists to make sense of life, and to trade, through the code of careful references, their opinions and film preferences
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Because of the way low budgets dictated certain stylistic features in French New Wave, many have linked the style to Italian Neorealism. The resounding difference between the two is that the New Wave is almost entirely apolitical. In Italy the cheap productions were due to the economic breakdown suffered after the war, and the sparse film style was both a fiscal necessity and an artistic reflection of the living conditions of the Italian people. French New Wave, by contrast, has been described as “a bourgeois cinema made by the bourgeois for the bourgeois” (Armes, French Cinema 169). France’s powerful economy in the early 1960s, and the governmental desire to revive the stagnating, near-bankrupt film industry, meant that filmmakers were offered financial aid from the French Cultural Minister to create their films (Lanzoni, 196). The French New Wave directors did not see themselves as political or social heroes of any kind. Their intentions were artistic and experimental; their films the pursuits of men who could afford to spend their lives on art, education and leisure. Truffaut sums up the thematic intentions of the French New Wave well in …show more content…
These were rebellions in themselves against the previous generation of French filmmakers’ tireless dedication to adaptations of famous literature:
Young directors were to offer a new look…at scenario with a fluid filmic narration inspired from their own personal reading and not the same old literary canons (Lanzoni,
Because of the way low budgets dictated certain stylistic features in French New Wave, many have linked the style to Italian Neorealism. The resounding difference between the two is that the New Wave is almost entirely apolitical. In Italy the cheap productions were due to the economic breakdown suffered after the war, and the sparse film style was both a fiscal necessity and an artistic reflection of the living conditions of the Italian people. French New Wave, by contrast, has been described as “a bourgeois cinema made by the bourgeois for the bourgeois” (Armes, French Cinema 169). France’s powerful economy in the early 1960s, and the governmental desire to revive the stagnating, near-bankrupt film industry, meant that filmmakers were offered financial aid from the French Cultural Minister to create their films (Lanzoni, 196). The French New Wave directors did not see themselves as political or social heroes of any kind. Their intentions were artistic and experimental; their films the pursuits of men who could afford to spend their lives on art, education and leisure. Truffaut sums up the thematic intentions of the French New Wave well in …show more content…
These were rebellions in themselves against the previous generation of French filmmakers’ tireless dedication to adaptations of famous literature:
Young directors were to offer a new look…at scenario with a fluid filmic narration inspired from their own personal reading and not the same old literary canons (Lanzoni,