STACK #150 Apr 2017

FEATURE EXTRAS

who in the late 1940s and early '50s launched a series of wildly publicised hearings into alleged Communist infiltration and subversion of the motion picture industry. The committee’s goal was to eradicate what they perceived as emerging left wing liberalism and radical propaganda contained within American movies. A group known as the Hollywood Ten (which included screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Alvah Bessie), when called before the committee, based their defence on the First Amendment-freedom of speech. Furthermore, they refused to reveal the names of those in the industry with ties to the Communist party and as a consequence, all ten were blacklisted and sent to prison. HUAC’s effect on Hollywood was profound; literally suffocating any social criticism or comments being expressed onscreen, which further removed American movie narrative and subjects from real life social issues. Although US movie theatre attendance was falling year on year, the popularity of “urban arthouses”– that screened European films – increased substantially during the 1950s and '60s. The immediate post-war Italian cinema had introduced a film movement that their filmmakers called neo-realism. Adopting quasi- documentary techniques, using the natural light

A scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg

Quo Vadis

By the early 1960s the European renaissance in film had gained international fame via various esteemed film festivals and became extremely popular with the youthful American arthouse audiences. The French New Wave films encountered some censorship difficulties when imported to the US, particularly those with an adult sexual theme. The Catholic Legion had always equated onscreen sex with sin and deemed that French films that contained realistic love scenes were far too explicit for American audiences. However, the Legion and the Motion Picture Association of America censorship only applied to mainstream US motion pictures, and although they vehemently condemned these European movies, neither organisation had the power to ban them outright when shown in privately owned theatres.  Meanwhile, the pressure remained on the American film industry to show social and

Francois Truffaut filming on

the streets of Paris with the camera set up in a motor vehicle

These cinephiles' (movie lovers) magazine articles vilified the traditional French film industry’s insistence on producing old fashioned historical costume dramas and literary adaptations, describing them as artificial, meaningless and out of touch with modern life. Following the lead of the Italian neo-realist

filmmakers, three of these critics – Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Goddard and Claude Chabrol – became amateur film directors, inventing novel ways to inexpensively fund and shoot their movies. Their films were primarily about French youth set in Paris, and owed more to documentary style and television shooting methods than mainstream commercial cinema. Shot principally on location with smaller production

Our fear of what censors will do keeps us from portraying life as it really is

cultural responsibility within their movie productions. But as early as the mid 1950s, a few of the old guard Hollywood filmmakers had begun to rebel against

Luchino Visconti shooting La Terra trema/The Earth Trembles

of location shooting and casting non-actors instead of stars as working class protagonists, their films captured the hardships of everyday life in a war shattered nation. Films such as Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City  (1945), Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief  and Luchino Visconti’s  The Earth Trembles  (both 1948) would permanently change the European rules of filmmaking. Many aspiring and soon-to-be

the strict and outdated censorship controls they had to work under. There

were also a group of young American movie fanatics studying film as an art form at USC and UCLA, who were fast becoming keen advocates of the innovative European cinema. Moreover, following graduation, these talented soon-to- be filmmakers would totally dismantle the old studio system of making films by adopting the style, themes and modes of production of the French New Wave. And, as a consequence, they would go on to write and direct some of the most thematically challenging movies ever to have come out of Hollywood.

crews, unknown actors (who were encouraged to improvise their lines), and the use of portable camera equipment set up in the trunk of a car

or hand-held on the back of a motorcycle, these filmmakers brought a refreshing and revolutionary simplicity to their movies. Films such as  Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins, The 400 Blows, Breathless  and the many others that followed became known as Nouvelle Vague  (The French New Wave) – one of the most significant and influential film movements in the history of cinema. 

film directors were fascinated by this refreshing post-war Italian aesthetic, which brought together an engaging narrative technique and the real social issues of poverty and unemployment. None more so than a community of French film critics writing for the film journal Cahiers du cinema  (translated as Notebooks on Cinema).

To be continued...

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