French New Wave Films are different from classical Hollywood films. Directors of French New Wave Films always complete a film with free editing style, they tend to break the rules of continuity in their editing to make the audience understand that they are watching a movie. French New Wave is well-known with the jump cut editing technique, and sudden cut between two shots that does not match the shots seamlessly. Jump cut editing technique often make the audiences feel jar, and it gives the audience perceive discontinuity, audience may be wondering where the narrative has got go. However, this reminds audience that they are actually watching a movie. Film that heavily used jump cuts is Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless.
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| "Breathless" by Jean-Luc used a lot of jump cuts |
Besides, directors that used French New Wave usually shot their films in a low budget condition. Because of the World War II, when France was recovering from the aftereffect of it, France is experiencing an economic crisis, so the investments to support movie makers are low. Thus, the directors in that time used French New Wave to complete films. Low budget films were being made by limited equipment, limited sponsorships, or limited crews. They shot a movie in a short period of time to lower down all the expended costs. The ways that they used to shot a low budget movie mostly will be using their friend’s apartment as their studio or invite their family and friends as casts or crews. Because the budget problem, they prefer to have the sound being recorded with the film. When they were recording films, all the dialogues or sound needed for the scene will be recorded on the spot also. . In French New Wave Films we can notice that the natural sound and light source were being used, such as sunlight, the light from street lamp, raining sound, sound of spinning fan and others. These make the films look less-polished and more naturalistic. From Breathless (1960), we can see that the shots for medium close-up are shaky and vibrate, and from the juxtapose of shots the eyelines do not match.
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the late 1950s, Éclair Company develops and operates the latest technology at
that time, which is hand-held camera. This significant change or advance of
technology created a huge impact to the filmmaking industry. How films being
made and looked changed by the invention of lightweight and cheap camera which
is affordable for amateur directors. The directors take a lot of advantages of
the new hand-held camera to produce their films at that time. Because of
hand-held camera, we can see a lot of scenes in the films are shaky and
unstable. Beside, we also found that there are so many over the shoulder shoots
in these films, such as the camera follow the characters walking alone or catch
their point of view over the character’s shoulders. Most of the directors in
French New Wave always prefer used one hand-held camera to shoot the scenes. So
if a single shoot or long shoot cannot use and cannot reshoot due to the budget
issues, they might use a series of jump cuts to complete the film. Beside point
of view, they also used mise-en-shot and long shot to shoot a film. Jean
Douchet states that the hand-held-camera has become the distinctive feature for
The French New Wave. He describes the new camera technology as: the camera was
being carried around the operator’s shoulder and actors’ movements can always
being followed closely. The camera allowed filmmakers to abandon heavy equipments.
Therefore, filmmakers can achieve new camera movements, new and unexpected
style exploded across the screen.
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| 1950s latest technology: Hand-held camera |
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| over the shoulder shoots: point of view |
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| Director holding hand-held camera with the crews |
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| Jean Douchet states that the hand-held-camera has became the distinctive feature for The French New Wave |
In
additional, we also found that the story lines in French New Wave films also as
easy as possible. The directors in French New Wave always shoot an open-ended
story and ended up with no climax. The stories also unpolished and less
structured by the directors or the script writer, the actors of the film even
don’t have their own script when the production is running. The production team
didn’t plan well before shooting and the dialogue always change or even write on
the same day. Sometimes the directors only giving the general idea of the
current scene to the actors and the actors need to communicate themselves. The
dialogue come with the actors themselves, so sometimes there are not related to
the storyline of the film at all. The actors will have to be spontaneous on the
shooting.
French New Waves directors cannot afford to employ famous actors. They will choose to employ unknown performers or people who are new in casting. As a result for directors rejecting the French “star system”, they indirectly discovered a new generation of actors, in some cases, bona fide actors were created. Another reason for directors not to use “stars” is because they do not wish to have their creativity limited or restricted by the “stars” that refuse to act as the director wish in the film. Director will also search for actors who can communicate “youthfulness”, “spontaneity” and “modernity”.
Apart from behind the scene, we also found that the characteristics of the actors in French New Wave Films are always anti-authoritative. The characters in these films are always marginalized, young anti-heroes, alienated loners and others. They have no family ties, behave spontaneous, freedom, and immorally. Male characters often kill police, fighting with others, be defiant; female characters are anti-authoritative, have the ability to make choices, arrogant and others. Both genders also realism and having free life style. Sometimes, the actors will direct covey their message to the camera, which call self-reflexivity. At the end, the characters of the film were ultimately alone.
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