Showing posts with label opinion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label opinion. Show all posts
Saturday, September 14, 2013

The French New Wave (1959-1964)

In the mid 1950s, a bunch of young men made a habit of attacking the most artistically respected French filmmakers of the day. And take note they wrote their criticisms on the influential french film magazine, Cahiers du Cinema.



We have Jean-Luc Godard who addressed the 21 major directors he asserted, "Your camera movements are ugly because your subjects are bad, your casts act badly because your dialogue is worthless; in a word you don't know how to create cinema because you no longer even know what it is". Francois Truffaut and Godard along with Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette also praised directors considered somewhat outdated or eccentric.

"We were all critics before beginning to make films and I loved all kinds of cinema, the Russians, the Americans, the Neorealists. It was the cinema that made us or me, at least want to make films. I knew nothing of life except through the cinema" - Jean Luc Godard, director.

I really liked that quote from Director Godard. Giving criticisms aren't used just to insult but to bring out the best in you. Being criticized is not fun at all but at least, you'll know what you lack. You'll be aware since you've been told about the things you need to change. I believe that it's a very effective tool for us to be able to realize that we can be the best.

Writing criticism didn't satisfy these young men, they are hungry to make movies. They even started borrowing money from friends and filming on location to shoot their short movies. 


New wave films pushed further the Neorealist experimentation with plot construction. The films often lack goal-oriented protagonists. New Wave narratives often introduce startling shifts in tone, jolting our expectations. The New Wave films ends ambiguously. 

The New wave offered not only several original and valuable films but they also demonstrated that renewal in the film industry could come from talented, aggressive young people inspired in large part by the love of cinema.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Movie Review: Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929)


We were able to see this 16-minute silent surrealist film entitled 'Un Chien Andalou' in our Cinema class last week. When the movie started, it was quite hard to understand because it seemed like the scenes are not related to each other at all. The time frame keeps on jumping to another time frame, and the flow of the whole story is not that clear to me. When a scenes comes up, I would be like "what happened? what's going to happen now?". There are a lot of actions in the movie that surely had meanings but I wasn't able to catch those up.

I find it difficult to understand the film because it feels like the film makes no sense at all not in a bad way though.  Everything going on with the film were dream-like and I think that it allows the audience to analyze the meaning behind it. The infamous razor eye slicing made me cringe, it was very disturbing and at the same time questionable because I really wasn't able to understand why it became like that.

Maybe because I am more exposed to films that has dialogue and everything that is why I find it hard to understand a film that is silent all throughout but nevertheless, I'm still convinced that this film is one of the most surreal film that was ever made in the film history.

You can watch the full movie HERE. :)
 

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