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 linked 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

Take telephone scene as an example, 

1. You can show both side of the characters talking and cut between them when they are changing lines. In this way audience can see and hear at the same time, it’s a easy way to understand what is going on

2. You can just show one person’s face for the entire time, and keep the other one off-screen. But we can hear the voice of the other one. In this way, audience will be interested in what the other character’s interests, motives, is he/she alone, what is she doing?…

3. You also just show one person’s face and voice broken by pauses. In this way, audience will keep lots of attention on the character’s expression and behaviors, and wondering what the other character said according to the character’s behavior.

sound shapes our understanding of images

Sound is the background of our visual world. ‘Chris Marker demonstrates the power of sound to alter our understanding what’s onscreen in his film, Letter from Siberia’. He shows the same image with different soundtrack, it turns out there is a big difference of what it brings to audience. ‘The audience will construct the same images differently, depending on the voice-over commentary.

sound direct our attention

When we hear something, we will think immediately about what happened there. In filmmaking, if the sound appears, then it cuts to next shot, we can see the answer, sometimes it is not what exactly we thought it is. Then we will think again. ‘Horror and mystery scenes often use a sound of an unseen source to engage audience’s interest, but all types of scenes can take advantage of that possibility. In addition, sound gives a new value to silence. A quiet passage in a film can create almost unbearable tension, forcing the viewer to concentrate on the screen.

reference: Bordwell,D & Thompson,K, FILM ART AN INTRODUCTION, Sound in cinema, pp.266-270.

In documentary films the person, place and events shown to audience are real. They exist or have existed. For example, in Forbidden Lies, Broinowski, the director insisted to go to find the hospital where Norma’s friend, Dalia, (As Norma claimed) who is killed by her family in an honor killing in Jordan. All documentaries do is to present factual information about the world. There are lots of ways of presenting in documentary, for instance, filmmakers can just simply record events that actually occur during the process, events that spontaneously occur, using visual aids like charts, maps, etc. For instance, in Forbidden Lies, when Norma sits on a chair, reading her book, based on a ‘real story’, Broinowski records the entire process-the process of filming Norma. Audience can see the filming sets, cameras, tracking dollies and hear Broinowski saying ‘action!’ Sometimes animation and comic can be used as well. Comic is used to show what happened in the court 11 years ago in The Thin Blue Line. What’s more, stage. Stage here is an important and common way of representation in documentary. Same location, the person doing the same thing, all the director will do is to ask the person wait for few seconds then he/she can frame it up. This does not mean there is something different here, the only difference is when the person does the thing regularly there is not a camera placed there and happens to shoot the entire process. However there is another kind of form of staging that involving actors. For example, in The True Blue Line directed by Errol Morris played back perfectly the murder scene in 1976 Dallas, Taxes. This documentary includes plenty strong evidences and logical conjectures like ‘mixes interviews and archival material with episodes performed by actors’. ‘The jittery reenactments of television true-crime shows are shot with smooth camera work, dramatic lighting, and vibrant color. The result is a film that not only seeks to identify the real killer but also raises questions about how fact and fiction may intermingle’ (Bordwell & Thompson 2013, p.353). From the examples above, it is proved that staging events will not make a film fictional or fake, it is just the fictional way to show the truth to audience, in fact staging sometimes intensify the documentary value of the film, and enhances the film’s reliability in some degree.

Documentary can be expressed in many different ways, there can be some fictional elements, there is no fixed rules of that is how a documentary is made. There are some conventions, but this does not conflict with the finding new ways and more progressive, dauntless way of finding the truth. Truth is there, it doesn’t come to people actively and it doesn’t say anything about itself. It all depends on what people discover, how people think about it and do people believe in it. Documentary is all about the truth, however sometimes the way of presenting the truth is hard to find. The truth is always hidden, so the way of presenting the truth has to be smart enough, at the same time objective enough because the truth never changes and it never is guaranteed by anything.

Reference: Bordwell, D & Thompson, K 2013, Film Art: An Introduction, 10th edn, University of Wisconsin-Madison, pp. 350-353 & pp.433-438.