New Wave Timeline 1960’s

1960

• Federico Fellini's La dolce vita, Michelangelo Antonioni's L'avventura, and Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers spearhead the European art cinema's modern turn.
• Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard's debut feature
• Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, is one of a cycle of British "Kitchen Sink" films dealing with everyday working-class life.
• Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom break new ground for representations of violence and criminal pathology.
• First ruby laser is built by Theodore Maiman.
• First successful hologram is produced.
• EG&G develops an extreme depth underwater camera for U.S. Navy.

1960s

• American drive-in theatre attendance peaks, then begins to decline as a new exhibition trend makes its appearance in the latter half of the decade: the shopping mall multiplex.
• Cinema, youth, and political cultures meet to produce several "new waves" around the world, most notably in Brazil, Britain, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latin America, Poland, and Yugoslavia.
• Commercial colour film is perfected.

1961

• Eastman Kodak introduces faster Kodachrome II colour film.
• Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, is a touchstone of reflexive, cerebral art cinema.
• Chronicle of a Summer by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, an experiment in collaborative ethnography and cinéma verité techniques.
• New York premiere of John Cassavetes's Shadows, a gritty, improvisational film exploring the theme of "passing for white" against the backdrop of white racism.
• In Hong Kong, the Shaw Brothers (Shaoshi) builds Movietown, a 46-acre complex of studios, sets, laboratory facilities, and dormitories.
• Notable films include Blake Edwards's Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story.
• Also in History: First manned space flight.

1962

• Terence Young's Dr. No, stars Sean Connery as Cold War superspy James Bond.
• Glauber Rocha's Barravento, is a foundation work for Brazil's Cinema Nôvo movement.
• New York Filmmaker's Co-op is organized by Jonas Mekas to support the production, distribution, and exhibition of experimental and avant-garde film.
• After a decade as Hollywood's reigning starlet, Marilyn Monroe dies of a drug overdose.
• David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia stars Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif.

1962-64

• Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man, emblematic of a cycle of lyric films aiming to record the act of seeing, the flow of imagination, and the sensation of emotion.

1962-69

• The major Hollywood studios are bought by and become subsidiaries of American conglomerates.

1963

• The film director as superstar: Federico Fellini's 8½
•  Senegalese writer/director Ousmane Sembene's Borom Sarret is the first indigenous black African film.
• William Asher's Beach Party, is the first in a series of teen-oriented beach films starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello.
• Foundation of the Swedish Film Institute, revolutionary in its system of awards to quality films.
• Alfred Hitchock’s The Birds
• President Kennedy is shot to death in Dallas by a sniper, Lee Harvey Oswald.
• Also in History: Racial clashes, civil rights demonstrations, mass march in Washington
• Civil Right Demonstration, Birmingham by Charles Moore
• 126 Cartridge / Instamatic Cameras are introduced.
• Polaroid introduces instant color film.

1964

• Police arrest theatre owners on obscenity charges in Los Angeles and New York City for screening Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures and Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, two scandalous works of the American underground.
• Popular films: Robert Stevenson’s Mary Poppins, George Cukor’s My Fair Lady, Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther.

1965

• Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, is a stylised science-fiction adventure set in the future and shot entirely on location in Paris.
• Introduction of Super 8, a new amateur format.
• David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago
• Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music. 

1965-73

•  Also in History: Vietnam War. 

1966

• Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, emblematic of pop art cinema and of "Swinging London". 
• Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers relocates neorealism in Third World struggles.
• Andy Warhol's Chelsea Girls, a two-screen film with random reel order, is the first mainstream success of the American underground.
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the first American film released with a rating ("SM"–Suggested for Mature Audience).

1967

• Mike Nichols's The Graduate and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde garner huge ticket sales by appealing to young anti-establishment audiences.
• Wavelength, a famous Structural film by Canadian Michael Snow.
• Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn star in the last of nine films they made together in Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
• Also in History: Protests over Vietnam reach climax when 35,000 demonstrate outside the Pentagon.

1967-73

• European art films link social with sexual revolutions: Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious–Yellow, Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema, Dušan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism.

1968

• Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a science fiction film of great technical accomplishment and a visionary quality without precedent.
• Argentinean filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's Hour of the Furnaces and Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, key works of the New Latin American cinema.
• The Motion Picture Producers of America (MPPA, formerly MPPDA) introduces a new four-point ratings system ranging from "G" to "X" to replace the now defunct Production Code.
• Student demonstrations in Czechoslovakia, France, Japan, Spain, the United States, and West Germany generate a wave of politically engaged collective filmmaking.
• Launching of the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage, an important festival for Arab cinema held biennially in Tunis.
• Also in History: Assassination of Martin Luther King.
• Also in History: Tet offensive staggers Vietnam.
• Vietnam Execution by Eddie Adams (Viet Cong officer killed).
• Robert Kennedy Moments After He Was Shot by Bill Eppridge.
• Photograph of Earth from the moon. 

1969

• Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider criticise the American myth of individual freedom and appeal to a growing anti-Vietnam War protest movement; John Schlesinger's X-rated Midnight Cowboy wins the Academy Award for Best Picture.
• Launching of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival (FESPACO) in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso.
• Also in History: Woodstock Festival.
• Man’s First Moon Walk by Neil Armstrong. 

French New Wave: Key Works

Alphaville: Une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution) is a 1965 black-and-white French science fiction film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It stars Eddie Constantine, Anna Karina, Howard Vernon and Akim Tamiroff. The film won the Golden Bear award of the 15th Berlin International Film Festival in 1965.

Alphaville combines the genres of dystopian science fiction and film noir. There are no special effects or elaborate sets; instead, the film was shot in real locations in Paris, the night-time streets of the capital becoming the streets of Alphaville, while modernist glass and concrete buildings (in 1965 they were new and strange architectural designs) represent the city's interiors. The film is set in a futuristic alternative present. The characters refer to twentieth century events; for example, the hero describes himself as a Guadalcanal veteran.

Expatriate American actor Eddie Constantine plays Lemmy Caution, a trenchcoat-wearing secret agent. Constantine had already played this or similar roles in dozens of previous films; the character was originally created by British pulp novelist Peter Cheyney. However, in Alphaville, director Jean-Luc Godard moves Caution away from his usual twentieth century setting, and places him in a futuristic sci-fi dystopia, the technocratic dictatorship of Alphaville.

The 400 Blows (French: Les quatre cents coups) is a 1959 French drama film directed by François Truffaut and starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Albert Rémy, and Claire Maurier. One of the defining films of the French New Wave, it displays many of the characteristic traits of the movement. Written by Truffaut and Marcel Moussy, the film is about a misunderstood adolescent in Paris who is thought by his parents and teachers to be a troublemaker. Filmed on location in Paris and Honfleur, The 400 Blows received numerous awards and nominations, including the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director, the OCIC Award, and a Palme d'Or nomination in 1959.

The film’s most famous shot is the closing freeze-frame, in which the boy is caught with his back to the sea. Simultaneously both sad and defiant, it remains one of the most famous endings in film history.

Jules and Jim (French: Jules et Jim) is a 1962 French film directed by François Truffaut based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship with writer Franz Hessel and his wife, Helen Grund.

One of the seminal products of the French New Wave, Jules and Jim is an inventive encyclopedia of the language of cinema that incorporates newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voiceover narration (by Michel Subor). Truffaut's cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with Jean-Luc Godard, who employed the latest lightweight cameras to create an extremely fluid film style. For example, some of the postwar scenes were shot using cameras mounted on bicycles.

Jeanne Moreau incarnates the style of the Nouvelle Vague actress. The critic Ginette Vincindeau has defined this as, "beautiful, but in a kind of natural way; sexy, but intellectual at the same time, a kind of cerebral sexuality, — this was the hallmark of the nouvelle vague woman." Though she isn't in the film's title Catherine is "the structuring absence. She reconciles two completely opposed ideas of femininity".

American New Wave: Documentary

'Une Femme est Une Femme'

With A Woman Is a Woman (Une femme est une femme), compulsively innovative director Jean-Luc Godard presents “a neorealist musical—that is, a contradiction in terms.” Featuring French superstars Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Jean-Claude Brialy at their peak of popularity, A Woman Is a Woman is a sly, playful tribute to—and interrogation of—the American musical comedy, showcasing Godard’s signature wit and intellectual acumen. The film tells the story of exotic dancer Angéla (Karina) as she attempts to have a child with her unwilling lover Émile (Brialy). In the process, she finds herself torn between him and his best friend Alfred (Belmondo). A dizzying compendium of color, humor, and the music of renowned composer Michel Legrand, A Woman Is a Woman finds the young Godard at his warmest and most accessible, reveling in and scrutinizing the mechanics of his great obsession: the cinema.

The Rules in Editing French & American New Wave

“Tidal wave” would have been a more appropriate name for this explosion of vibrant, innovative, and highly self-conscious films by young French directors in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The informal movement was spearheaded by a handful of critics from Cahiers du cinéma—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette—whose incisive writings were matched by their films: bold, modern takes on classical masters that reworked genres like noir and the musical, and experimented with techniques antiquated and discovered. While Godard’s Breathless and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows remain the twin groundbreaking events of the movement, films such as Alain Resnais’Hiroshima mon amour and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 were watersheds as well, finding excited audiences hungry for a new, energetic, political cinema opposed to the stuffy “cinema of quality,” as Truffaut put it, of the old guard. Though the movement quickly dissipated, filmmakers like Godard, Rivette, Varda, and Rohmer continue to pioneer today.

Jean-Luc Godard: The Original Auteur

Se7en Magazine:

When one thinks of an auteur director, who is the first that comes to mind? Martin Scorsese? The Coens? Pedro Almódovar? Though these three would all make an iconic filmmakers list, the word “auteur” would have a different meaning, if it existed at all, if it were not for Jean-Luc Godard. He matches both radical themes and eccentric characters with unconventional cinematography – breaking diegesis left, right and centre. During a time when the French film industry could only be described as “Le Cinema du Papa”, Godard rebelled in a massive way, disregarding the traditions of lavish sets, rigid scripts and willowy, upper-class characters; he had his own way of telling a story.

Born in 1930’s Paris to wealthy parents, Godard first began his quest into filmmaking when he co-founded a Gazette du cinema in 1950. A year later, his parents had cut off his financial support and left young Godard with little money but big ideas. Along with contemporaries André Bazin, Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut, Godard began his foray into experimental cinema, forming the nucleus of what we now call “French New Wave directors” or cahiers du cinéma. He dabbled in documentaries and short films before finally making his most successful and iconic feature film: Á bout de souffle.

Roughly translated as "Breathless", Godard’s first feature film, co-written by Truffaut, was released in 1960. It was praised for its uniqueness and innovation; never before has a director used the jump cut so prolifically. He uses back-to-basics filmmaking, abandoning sets in favour of real locations. He rarely uses anything but natural lighting and handheld cameras and intentionally breaks the spell of cinema. He has no problem with revealing cinematic artifice; at one point, our hero, Michel Poiccard is humming a tune while the shot cuts several times despite tune remaining intact. Poiccard also uses direct address. Here Godard uses abstract realism. His themes reflect the existential boredom suffered by the youth of the time, explored through his non-motivated dialogue and fragmented narrative.

Keyframe presents the online debut of Godardloop, a multi-part video essay on the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Produced by Michael Baute and edited by Bettina Blickwede, this video explores a treasure trove of imagery found in dozens of Godard’s features and shorts, grouping them among several distinct themes. 47 films spanning 50 years of filmmaking are transformed into a stream of images that attest to an inimitable talent: an artist who can transform the world simply by the way he looks at it through his camera.

Godardloop - Visual Motifs in Films of Jean-Luc Godard from Fandor Keyframe on Vimeo.

The French New Wave: 3 Moments of radical change

1. The Blum-Byrnes Trade Agreement Of 1946 

• American imports were regulated during this post-war period. 
• 13 weeks were set as the maximum number for screening purely French films. 
• This corresponded to the production capacity of the French film industry, badly hit by lack of investment during the war. 
• TV was slow to take off. 
• Specialist press flourished. 
• Serious discussion of film flourished. 
• Most particularly “Cahiers du Cinema” (1951) 
• Cinema in France was taken extremely seriously for the first time. 
• Art screenings and discussions were common. 
• Created by University drop-outs this ‘counter-culture’ attempted to position cinema within the mainstream of French and European culture. 
• Andre Bazin, Jean-Luc Godard, Francis Truffaut (critics) 

2. The Nouvelle Vague (new wave)

• These critics went on to make films. 
• They dispensed with the technical hierarchies required by traditional cinema. 
• Divisions between – producer / director / editor / cameraman / actor / writer - became blurred 
• Worked from an idea - improvised - work on other films as (actors/writers etc) 
• Used their own apartments instead of sets & cast friends & girlfriends in starring roles. New actors and actresses employed. 
• Subject matter changed. Literary adaptation went out the window. They wrote about things that they knew: Relationships/lives etc. 
• They had the look of documentaries and explored the relationship between ‘fiction’ and ‘doc’ and ‘naturalism’ and ‘formalism’.
• They also incorporated a consciousness of the history of cinema – especially Hollywood. 

3. The Events of May 1968

• Many Directors demonstrated against the governments proposals to take over the film organisations Cinematheque. 
• Students/workers rioting. 
• Nouvelle vague directors were seen to be aligned with this new political radicalism. 
• Godard’s “Le Petit Soldat” (1960) was considered critical of the war in Algeria. Was not released till 1963. 

Issues

• Sexual politics/Gender/Prostitution/Homophobia 

Nouvelle Vague created

• The low budget art film 
• The director as auteur
• Introduced a radical approach to genre and narrative

Cities and Cinema: French New Wave

'Looking For Truffaut': Documentary

New Wave Editing

While Godard's films stand out for their opposition to cinematic conventions, particularly those that manipulate audience reactions, generalisations about the director's style must acknowledge that "style" is a convention he appears to reject by constantly changing what he does and the way he does it. Breathless offers a comprehensive catalogue of New Wave stylistic traits: rapid movements, use of handheld cameras, unusual camera angles, elliptical editing, direct address to the camera, acting that borders on the improvisational, anarchic politics, and an emphasis on the importance of sound, especially words. In light of Godard's later work, however, Breathless can seem rather more conventional in style than its reputation as an "experimental" film suggests, a paradox that demonstrates the extent to which Godard's language has entered all realms of filmaking, including the mainstream. "What makes Breathless a quintessential New Wave film," Dudley Andrew explains, "is not a particular technique or techniques but the energy with which it speaks." Thus Godard's "style" is characterized primarily by displays of artistic freedom and imagination. Nonmainstream filmmaking allowed (and continues to allow) him a freedom from the "constraints" that come with larger budgets.

An analysis of the opening scene of Breathless confirms that Godard both avoids and uses most of the traditional techniques for establishing a scene and character. Within a conventional film, the first shot might have been a LS (or XLS) of Michel sitting at an outdoor café along a harbor quay. Instead, Godard uses a MCU of the front page of the Paris Flirtnewspaper, which conceals Michel's face and the Marseilles location, offering instead a photograph of a woman in a swimsuit. Despite the lack of a traditional establishing shot, we can recognize from the weather and clothes in the subsequent shots that the time is summer, but we would be hard-pressed to know from any outward signs that the location is the port city Marseilles in southern France. However, the location is not as important as Michel's self-description: "All in all, I'm a dumb bastard. After all, if you've got to do it, you've got to." Next, when a couple get out of a big American car, a woman signals Michel, who hot-wires and steals the Americans' car and drives away. Godard uses a dissolve, that most conventional of devices, to get us from the city to the countryside and the open road.

Edited from: wwnorton.com/college/film/movies2

Film & Film Theory Site

This site provides excellent links to New Wave articles and Film theory.

Very useful for The Contextual Study Unit.

There is a link available if you scroll down the right hand of the blog. Or click here.

'Jean-Luc Cinema Godard' Documentary

Video Essay: Claude Chabrol's 'Les Bonnes Femmes'

Unsentimental Education: On Chabrol's LES BONNES FEMMES from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

'Love Is A Blonde': Sequence Breakdown

French film-maker Chris Marker dies

The controversial Left Bank Cinema director scored an arthouse hit with Sans Soleil and made the brilliant, haunting, highly influential La Jetée.

• Chris Marker obituary

Chris Marker, the enigmatic master of left-field French cinema, has died at the age of 91. The artist and film-maker was best known for his award-winning documentary Sans Soleil and for his haunting drama La Jetée, charting the quest for memory in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse.Marker's other notable pictures include 1985's AK, an essay on the work of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and 1977's A Grin Without a Cat, charting the socialist struggle in the period before and after the 1968 Paris uprisings. He scored an arthouse hit with 1983's Sans Soleil, his elliptical meditation on travel and memory that darted from Japan to Africa via an appreciation of the 1958 thriller Vertigo. Hitchcock's movie, said the director, was the only film "capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory".

Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, Marker fought for the French Resistance and then cut his teeth as a journalist and a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. He made his film debut with Olympia 52, a documentary on the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and went on to become a leading light of the Left Bank Cinema movement alongside his friends Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais. In 1961 he sparked controversy with the documentary Si Cuba, a film that praised Fidel Castro, denounced America and was promptly banned in the US.

Yet Marker's most influential production remains 1962's La Jetée, a 29-minute drama composed almost entirely of still images and tracing one man's attempt to reclaim an image from his past. Marker's poetic, provocative meld of global catastrophe and human frailty went on to inspire the 1987 drama The Red Spectacles and Terry Gilliam's 1995 blockbuster 12 Monkeys.

The teasing, elliptical nature of Marker's work was reflected in the man himself. He refused to give interviews, hated being photographed and claimed to have born in Mongolia despite contradictory sources that suggested he was a native of Paris. All of which, wrote the critic David Thomson, fostered the notion of Marker as "some mysterious if ideal figure, a hope or a dream more than an actual person". He was, Thomson added, "the essential ghost".

guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 July 2012