scholarly journals Musique concrète, French New Wave cinema, and Jean Cocteau'sLe Testament d'Orphée(1960)

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA ANDERSON
Keyword(s):  
Art Music ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
French Film ◽  
Unique Position ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Musique Concrete

AbstractJean Cocteau (1889–1963) is recognized as one of France's most well-known film directors, directing six films over a thirty-year period. This article argues that his film soundscapes occupy a unique position in the history of French film sound, providing a key link between contemporary experimentation in art music and the sonic experimentation of the New Wave filmmakers. This argument is best exemplified byLe Testament d'Orphée(1960), which represents the apotheosis of Cocteau's artistic output as well as the stage at which he was most confident in handling the design of a film soundscape. Indeed, Cocteau was comfortable with the selection and arrangement of sonic elements to the extent that his regular collaborator Georges Auric became almost dispensable. Nevertheless, Auric's willing support enriched the final film and Cocteau created a highly self-reflexive work through his arrangement of the composer's music with pre-existing musical borrowings. Cocteau's engagement with contemporary developments in film and art music can be heard throughout this film, highlighting his position as a poet simultaneously establishing himself in the canon of art and looking to the future.

Clair, René (1898–1981)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Leskosky
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
New Technology ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
French Film ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Between The Acts

Filmmaker, novelist, and critic René Clair (original name René-Lucien Chomette) was one of the foremost French film directors of the 1920s and 1930s. His first film, Paris qui dort [The Crazy Ray] (1923) combined Surrealism and science fiction and generated images of a Paris frozen in time. His second, Entr’acte (1924), created to be shown between the acts of Francis Picabia’s dadaist ballet Relache, became the epitome of dadaist film with its innovative comedy and random images. His lyrical Eiffel Tower documentary, La Tour [The Tower] (1928), presents an impressionistic montage of the structure’s details. Clair’s silent features, such as Un Chapeau de paille d’Italie [An Italian Straw Hat] (1927), achieved international renown, and he dominated the early sound period with Sous les toits de Paris [Under the Roofs of Paris] (1930) and A nous la liberté (1931). The latter’s sophisticated use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound demonstrated a profound mastery of the new technology. Its Surrealism-tinged take on capitalism arguably influenced sections of Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). A recurring Clair theme concerns his protagonist achieving wealth and then losing it but nonetheless (re)gaining happiness. Clair’s career continued with comedies and fantasies in England and America and a postwar return to France, but his critical standing never regained its 1930s’ heights, partly due to the biases of Nouvelle vague [French New Wave] critics.

scholarly journals The Phenomenon of the French NewWave. Technology or Ideology?

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 72-83
Author(s):  
Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Vinogradov ◽  
Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Vinogradov
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
French Film ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
History Of

The article is devoted to the history of the French New Wave. The author tries to find out its sources and comes to the conclusion that it is impossible explain this phenomenon of French film art of the late 1950s-early 1960s by either technological or ideological revolution alone.

Sonic ‘Detheatricalization’: Jean Cocteau, Film Music, and ‘Les Parents Terribles’

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 654-684
Author(s):  
Laura Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Original Form ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Jean Cocteau ◽  
Wave Treatment ◽  
French Film ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
History Of ◽  
Working Method

Abstract Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of his controversial play Les Parents terribles for the screen stands out in his oeuvre as an attempt to reconcile theatre and cinema. It also presented a challenge in preparing a soundscape for a work that did not have any music in its original form. Parents occupies a unique, Janus-like position in the history of French film music, as forward-looking in its anticipation of New Wave treatment of music as material as it is representative of the turn to adapting stage plays for the screen that started in the 1930s. Drawing on production sketchbooks and testimonies, this article considers the development of Cocteau’s working method and his collaboration with Georges Auric, fuelled by the director’s desire to take control of sonic matters. The resulting employment of a monothematic score was not only a new solution to the famous problem of filmed theatre, ‘detheatricalizing’ Parents sonically and visually, it contributed considerably to the development of Cocteau’s status as film auteur—one whose role now extended to adapting musical material. Furthermore, the effect of this compositional technique in Parents suggests that it can be fruitfully situated in relation to recent work in film music studies on issues of anempathetic scoring practices.

Rohmer, Éric (1920–2010)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Ionita
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
Moral Choice ◽  
French Film ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Eric Rohmer ◽  
Theology And Philosophy ◽  
Film Critic

Éric Rohmer (born Jean-Marie-Maurice Schéer) was a French film director, screenwriter, and film critic, best known for his association with the French New Wave, and his sophisticated films exploring the intersections of romantic desire and moral choice. A student of literature, theology, and philosophy with a degree in history, Rohmer started as a teacher, but soon gravitated, like many future New Wave directors, toward Henri Langlois’ Cinémathèque Française and he also began writing for Cahiers du cinéma in 1951. He was its editor from 1957 to 1963.

Bazin, André (1918–1958)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Neville Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Film Theory ◽  
Early Death ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Orson Welles ◽  
French Film ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Eric Rohmer ◽  
Andre Bazin ◽  
Robert Flaherty

André Bazin (born April 18, 1918, Angers, France–died November 11, 1958, Nogent-sur-Marne, France) was an influential French film critic who was active during the development of postwar film theory. Directing cine-clubs during the Nazi Occupation, he co-founded the monthly film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951 with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, which he edited until his early death of leukaemia. Publishing 2,600 articles during his lifetime, he was preparing the four-volume collection of his writing, Qu-est-ce que le cinéma? [What Is Cinema?], at the time of his death. A champion of Italian Neorealism, Robert Flaherty, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles, he helped to launch filmmakers of the French New Wave [Nouvelle vague] who developed their formal convictions as writers at Cahiers, including Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, and his foster-son François Truffaut.

Popular Front Activism and Vichy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tami Williams
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
French Film ◽  
Political Position ◽  
Vichy Regime ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Cultural Movement

This chapter details the evolution of Dulac's socialist humanist politics under the Popular Front, from her activism and syndicalism or labor union work within the context of the vast cultural movement of Mai '36, to a rather controversial shift that led to her complex political position under the Vichy regime. During this era, from 1936 to 1938, Dulac's activism for the cinema and by way of the cinema blossomed. She undertook several Socialist film projects, and played a major role in restructuring the French film industry and in cultivating a propitious environment for the future of the medium. Her role was central on several fronts, from the nationalization of the industry to the creation of a French cinematheque and a film directors' union.

Cinema's Doppelgängers

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Doug Dibbern
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Fritz Lang ◽  
Sergei Eisenstein ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

Cinema’s Doppelgängers is a counterfactual history of the cinema – or, perhaps, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film and movie guide. That is, it’s a history of the movies written from an alternative unfolding of historical time – a world in which neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis came to power, and thus a world in which Sergei Eisenstein never made movies and German filmmakers like Fritz Lang never fled to Hollywood, a world in which the talkies were invented in 1936 rather than 1927, in which the French New Wave critics didn’t become filmmakers, and in which Hitchcock never came to Hollywood. The book attempts, on the one hand, to explore and expand upon the intrinsically creative nature of all historical writing; like all works of fiction, its ultimate goal is to be a work of art in and of itself. But it also aims, on the other hand, to be a legitimate examination of the relationship between the economic and political organization of nations and film industries and the resulting aesthetics of film and thus of the dominant ideas and values of film scholarship and criticism.

Truffaut, François (1932–1984)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Ionita
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
French Film ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
Film Critic

François Truffaut was a French film director, actor, and film critic, best known for being one of the founders of the French New Wave—a movement he helped usher in with his film Les Quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959)—a realistic, compassionate tale of youthful alienation and rebellion.

François Truffaut

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Steven Spielberg ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
French New Wave ◽  
History Of ◽  
Auteur Cinema ◽  
Iconic Figure

François Truffaut (b. 1932–d. 1984) is renowned both for the originality and the enduring popularity of his films, being considered an iconic figure of the French New Wave, a movement for which he was an aggressive and controversial spokesman. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, Truffaut was a critic and film theorist, contributing to the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Notorious for his ferocious attack on traditional French “quality cinema,” he also asserted that the director is the true author of a film, on the grounds that a director’s stylistic and thematic choices reveal his identity as surely as fingerprints. Having turned to filmmaking, Truffaut achieved instant success with his first feature film, The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups), which gained a prize at the Cannes Festival in 1959 and was universally acclaimed. Thereafter, he regularly produced a film every two years, accumulating an oeuvre of twenty-five films, a number of which, such as Day for Night (La Nuit américaine, 1973) and The Last Metro (Le Dernier Métro, 1980), were highly successful both in France and abroad. Subsequently, Truffaut’s reputation suffered a decline as his popularity grew with the incorporation of elements of genre cinema into his films, which caused certain of his fellow filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, to see him as betraying the ideals of the New Wave for the sake of achieving commercial success. In recent years, however, there has been a revival of interest in Truffaut, reflected in several retrospectives of his films, and the discovery of complexities in his work that have modified earlier appraisals of him as a sentimental, lightweight filmmaker. Indisputably, Truffaut has exerted an enormous influence on subsequent filmmaking in France and elsewhere, his influence being most evident in the auteur cinema of le Jeune Cinéma Français (Young French Cinema) of the 1990s and 2000s, the New Hollywood cinema of the 1970s, recent American “indie” movies, and various “New Waves” in a number of national cinemas such as those of Germany, Denmark, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand. Prominent contemporary filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, Arnaud Desplechin, and Tsai Ming Liang have freely confessed their debt to Truffaut, leaving little doubt that Truffaut is emerging as one of the most influential figures in the history of cinema. Tragically, Truffaut’s career was cut short by his death from a brain tumor in 1984, leaving a number of foreshadowed projects unrealized.

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