French New Wave

cinematographers, actors, lighting operators, sound designers etc. The auteur theory holds the director, and only the director, accountable for the film’s outcome. This idea of the director is communicated clearly in a quote by the highly influential French director Francois Truffaunt: “There are no good and bad movies, only good and bad directors.”(Thomson-Jones 2008). In this day and age, the term auteur is commonly used to describe a director who’s style is unique and who’s films are…

begin to hone in our concept to a more narrow ideology. This week centers on the larger question of ‘what is an Author?’ Janet Staiger opens this week by listing problems with authorship studies, Francois Truffaut follows with his negative opinions of French cinema and what appears to be a form of authorship existing there, and Andre Bazin closes the week with an introduction to the auteur theory. Staiger draws on two major problems with authorship studies as flaws that have a tendency to…

Early poetic realism films such as Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game criticized the corruption, and, immorality of the French upper class; as if recalling these years, Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife partakes in a similar criticism of the French bourgeoisie. At the start of the film, the audience is introduced to the seemingly perfect yet wealthy Desvallées family. The family is portrayed as being perfect as they embody the qualities of a conservative family including morality, good taste…

Godard used a few difference camera angles and styles such as iris shot, close up, medium and wide shots, and camera movement. Godard also used many jump cuts and quick cuts to shift between scenes. For instance, in the beginning, he used jump and quick cuts of close up shots of Michel and a woman that let the audience have the illusion of Michel is having a very close relationship with with that woman. As Godard switch to a wide-angle shot, that’s where we know we have been fooled and they were…

a assistant director on fifteen adverts before releasing his first feature in 1981 ‘Diva’, which attracted the attention of key post-modernism theorist Frederic Jameson, who identified it as the first French postmodern film. Despite ‘Diva’ becoming a cult film for the youth of the time, the French film critic establishment did not appreciate the superficial aspects of its postmodern aesthetics. It was simply considered an irrational attachment to visually pleasing imagery at expense of character…

vision is reflected in their work. In the New Hollywood era genre and auteurism started to intersect due to the fact that auteurs were able to make their mark in genre films. They were able to put their personal spin on a formulaic genre film. Coppola did a lot of what we would call genre films over the course of his career, but due to his label of auteur, none of these films seem to carry any classic tropes of the genre they belong to. 70’s cinema, or the New Hollywood era, was the renaissance…

The film Les 400 Coups is autobiographical, through the character of Antoine Doinel, Truffaut recounts the struggles of his upbringing as a troubled young adolescent in Paris. Les 400 Coups (a French expression meaning to “raise hell”) shows the result of neglectful, or entirely absent, parenting as it is of youth delinquency. Antoine is certainly not blameless, many of his actions are dictated by necessity. He is a victim of circumstance. There is no doubt as to where our sympathies lie or…

Le Corbeau, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot, was released in 1943 during World War 2 in France. The film was produced by Continental, a French film production company bankrolled by the German government to produce lighthearted and joyful films that had no political plot, but rather played on and exploited the French culture. Clouzot got fired before Le Corbeau release due to it’s harsh look at provincial France, which was quite the opposite of what the Germans wanted. In the film, Clouzot…

exhibit on Severson and Griffin at the Chapman Hilbert Museum, this exhibit contributed to a deeper understanding of the surf culture. Severson and Griffin were two passionate artists who loved nothing more than waking up in the morning and riding the waves. These two young men founded what is now known as the Surf Art Culture across America. Rick Griffin began surfing when he was 14 years old and has enjoyed the beauty of it ever since similar to other professional surfers I have learned…

the same tune as when young. In like manner, the interval increases until a perfect pitch is heard. In this paper we will examine both the mathematics and music background for these ideas. We will examine the Fourier series representations of sound waves. Furthermore, we will see how they relate to harmonics and tonal color of instruments. The goal in this paper is aimed at exploring…