What I am going to shoot for my short film just reminds me of this movie I watched before, Une femme est une femme. I remember that some one once said that this movie just doesn’t make any senses but I just like it. In the movie, there is not that much narration, but there is lots of performance. And the cinematography is awesome. It is just beautiful to look at.
Une femme est une femme is a French movie directed by Jean-Luc Godard, starring by Jean-Claude Brialy and Anna Karina. It is the typical representation of French New Wave. This kind of filmmaking style was active during the period between 1950s and 1960s. The New Wave filmmakers were linke
d by their self-conscious rejection of the literary period pieces being made in France and written by novelists, along with their spirit of youthful iconoclasm, the desire to shoot more current social issues on location, and their intention of experimenting with the film form. ‘New Wave’ is an example of European Art Cinema. In the film, the most noticeable is the applying of sounds. Differ from the classical narrative movie, the sound is very jumpy. It usually goes and stops. The movie has a strong focus on the principals’ psychologies struggling. It is presented in a very realistic, relaxing and funny way.
Generally, art cinema started to appear after World War II when the Hollywood cinema was beginning to wane. Overseas market and exhibition platforms are very essential for film production. After 1954, films started to be made for a wider audience, international audience. American film made their own screen time by sponsoring foreign production. The art cinema is an important factor of economy then, so it is developed well and continues.
The classical narrative cinema refers to ‘cause-effect logic and narrative parallelism generate a narrative which projects its action through psychologically defined, goal oriented characters’. However art cinema is different from the classical narrative cinema. It is specifically against the cause-effect linkage of events. Basically, the art cinema’s narrative is driven by two principles, realism and authorial expressivity. By realism, it meant that it shows the audience the real location and problem. Also sexual is a part of reality. What’s more, the most important one is the psychologically complex characters. In classical narrative cinema, characters usually have a defined desire and goal. Meanwhile in art cinema, characters lack defined desires or goals. So characters are usually act for consistent reasons and even ask themselves about their goals. So in art cinema, characters are usually expressing and explaining their psychological states. ‘Violations of classical conception of time and space are justified as the intrusion of an unpredictable and contingent daily reality or as the subjective reality of complex characters.’
Art cinema is not exactly isolated from other cinematic practices. It has neighbors on each side. They are classical narrative cinema and modernist cinema respectively. The former one is the historically dominant mode, the latter one is all about perceptual play, no thematic ambivalence at all. ‘If Hollywood is adopting traits of the art cinema, that process must been seen as not simply copying but complex transformation. In particular, American film genre intervene to wrap art-cinema conventions in new direction’.
Reference: ‘The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice’ in Catherine Fowler (ed) The European Cinema Reader. Routledge. London & New York. 2002. pp. 94-102