Anatomy of a film revolution: The case of the Nouvelle Vague (original) (raw)
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How can we define "new" in cinema? Is it creating a new film movement where a new group of filmmakers emerges to call themselves the next independent movement? Is it a new cinema in an age when every day some new technological delivery system (3D, Blu-ray, VOD) changes methods of distribution and exhibition? What about a sudden shift in production economics of a nation's cinema that goes from no filmaudience to millions in dollars and audience attendance, a year later? Identifying a new cinematic phenomenon is one thing. How to define and analyse it, what methodologies to use in understanding the dynamics of that new core requires novel approaches. Yet how does one define the novelty of a group of films? Should they add a new style to the world of cinema? Should there be a manifesto appealing to an audience? Should it be accompanied by new modes of production? Who decides and defines a new cinema: filmmakers, critics or the audiences? Let us take neorealismo as a new film movement that came out of Italy in the 1950s. Socio-political conditions (in the aftermath of war) created a shortage of camera and film stocks. This necessity of low tech gave rise to use of streets with real people. This in turn fuelled a new film aesthetic. What of French New Wave cinema that came about in the 1960s? It came about because of artistic boredom, as a rebellion of young filmmakers rejecting a stale salon aesthetic of the older generation of directors. French Nouvelle Vague could claim the streets because of the high-tech, the new hand-held camera and sound recording devices that allowed for shooting in the streets. These two countries share two opposing social and political conditions in two different decades, and yet they also share similarities in artistic sentiment. The new in cinema is a new aesthetic vision, fuelled by a new desire to tell human stories differently with the assistance of new media technologies.