Chapter 2 The main characteristics of the "New Wave" in creation

The "New Wave" (also known as "Cinema School", "Author's Film") author's film style, under the influence of Bazin theory and Italian neorealist films, mostly records or expresses an event or some characters in a focused way. .Therefore, it has a strong documentary nature, and many films have a strong personal biographical color.For example: Truffaut's debut novel "Being Unreasonable" and its sequels "Yue Kiss", "Twenty Years Old Love", "Marital Life" and so on.These films have conquered the audience with an unprecedented truth and sincerity.Godard said: "The sincerity of the new wave is that it well expresses the life and things it is familiar with, rather than sloppyly expressing things it does not understand."Author's films often integrate screenwriting, directing, dialogue, music, and even production, forming a unified production method.From the perspective of film concepts, the "New Wave", like the avant-garde, challenged traditional film concepts. These two film aesthetic movements were a powerful blow to commercial films.From a formal point of view, the "New Wave" has a lot in common with Italian neo-realist films, but the difference is that the "New Wave" and "New Realism" are different in the theme and content of the film. "Realism" has a significant social aspect, while "New Wave" has a strong personal color.

Theme: Apolitical cinema.In the works of the New Wave, the characters seem to come into the world with the wind, drift in the world with the wind, and leave the world with the wind. "Breakout" is the most illustrative of this.Into films that deny traditional notions of morality. One of the achievements of the "New Wave" is to overcome some kind of forbidden steel, trying to describe men and women and love sincerely, exposing hypocrisy.They are interested in what really happened, rather than being constrained by traditional concepts based on "good" and "evil".Jules and Jim (1962) shot by Truffaut is the most representative.

Photography method: The photography style focuses on the photographic nature of the film, and the photographers focus on the freshness of the picture, rejecting functionalism or pedantic picture production.They emerged in a new naturalistic style of photography.This is closely related to the name of Raoul Gudal.Gurdard was Godard's inseparable photographer, and he shot all of Godard's films from 1959 to 1968, and some of the films he collaborated with Truffaut.Due to the low production cost and short period of the "New Wave", the directing and performance style of shooting on location and improvisation determined Gudal's photography style.He uses more natural light and weak light in his photography.He created a shooting method similar to documentaries or newsreels, such as shoulder-mounted camera, follow-up shooting, and rush shooting, forming a very strong realistic style.These styles of Gudal endow the film with a natural, realistic and occasional creative style.In the works of the "New Wave", not only the integrity of time and space of the film and the sense of rhythmic movement are taken into account, but also a large number of long shots and depth-of-field shots, especially the use of some very flexible mobile photography Q-Godard said: "Photographic movement is a moral issue".He elevated the pursuit of aesthetics to the level of theory.Since then, follow-up, telephoto, zoom, freeze frame, continuous panoramic photography, framing adjustment, and camera tremor have been used as artistic methods one after another.

Sound processing: "New Wave" uses a large number of natural sound environments to increase the realism of the works.Sometimes the dialogue of the characters is drowned out in the stereo.At that time, due to the low investment, most of them were recorded at the same time and the production cycle was short. This was the most cost-effective way.Editing: Montage is no longer a means of expressing thoughts and explaining psychology, but only as a means of cutting time and space. The directors of the "New Wave" were interested in the length of the film, the pace of the film.They implemented a method of fast editing that increased the number of shots in the movie.Traditional methods such as canceling occlusion, turning out people, fading out to talk about people, etc., adopt direct connection between shots, and make jumps in the relationship between time and space.This kind of editing undoubtedly speeds up the audience's visual rhythm and reduces the cumbersome and lengthy narrative.The use of long shots is to increase the true color of the film.The fast editing method is to increase the visual rhythm.After the "New Wave", Truffaut and Chabrol's long shots, Godard's jump cuts and fast editing have become the basic artistic methods of contemporary French films, and they have been used to this day.

Performance: Contrary to the traditional star system, they have used a large number of unknown young people as actors.At the same time, they also drew on the ways of the amateur actors of Italian neorealist cinema, and the "acting without acting" style of James Death and Marlon Brando.At the same time, the directors of the "New Wave" also appeared one after another, playing the roles in their films.In fact, the "New Wave" also created its own stars: Bernadette Lafont, Jean-Paul Belmondo.Their performances are completely out of theatrical tone, real, simple, and natural. In short, the "New Wave" doesn't care about the traditional language and grammar of movies.They adopt a very flexible production principle. The director does not pursue what should be done or what should not be done, but pursues personal style, and can do whatever he wants, forming the concept of "author's film".At the same time, this concept has influenced Germany, Japan, the United States, and even the whole world.