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

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.

Mid Unit Assessment - Checklist:

At this stage of the year we would like you all to self-assess your progress by completing the checklist we that we have distributed (copy as above). If you have any questions please ask any of your HNC teachers.

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

Constructive Editing: 'Pickpocket' (1959)

Constructive Editing in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket from David Bordwell on Vimeo.

The Kuloshev Effect: Editing

The Kuleshov Effect is a well-documented concept in film-making, discovered by Soviet film editor Lev Kuleshov in the 1920s. Kuleshov put a film together, showing the expression of an actor, edited together with a plate of soup, a dead woman, and a woman on a recliner. Audiences praised the subtle acting, showing an almost imperceptible expression of hunger, grief, or lust in turn. The reality, of course, is that the same clip of the actor's face was re-used, and the effect is created entirely by its superimposition with other images.

More generally, the Kuleshov Effect is the basis of Soviet montage cinema, and is used in many many films since. The idea is that, by editing different things together, it is possible to create meanings that didn't exist in either of the images put together - constructing 'sentences' and 'texts' out of film.

Old Apparatus 'Compendium' (Live): Experimental Music Video

Old Apparatus 'Compendium' (Live) from Sullen Tone on Vimeo.

'Choros': Experimental Film

A chorus of women are borne from the movements of a single dancer in this dreamlike "pas de trente-deux."

"Choros" premiered at Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in 2012 and has gone on to play dozens of festivals worldwide. The film is currently broadcast in Europe by Canal+.

Directed by Michael Langan and Terah Maher

Music by Steve Reich

Choros from Michael Langan on Vimeo.

More information can be found here: langanfilms.com/choros.html