Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...uncritical, but there are good historical reasons for it. American audiences which go one night to see Antonioni and the next Godard, and like them for the same things, are implicitly recognizing a clear line of aesthetic influence. A healthy chunk of the French New Wave's conception of film comes from Neo-Realism (Antonioni, visconti, Rossellini, de Sica, Fellini). Neo Realism's original choice of social reality for subject-matter and its tendency to documentary as method had a tremendous influence in France, giving rise to a large school of French documentarists (Jean Rouch, Chris Marker) and a larger...
Nevertheless, none of the new film movements really makes documentaries. The films of the Neo-Realists were the action of social reality on a particular sensibility: Open city (Rossellini), far from being objective, details at every moment Rossellini's outrage at the Nazi occupation of Rome. Godard's films similarly document the meeting or reality and sensibility, instead of documenting reality in a direct, objective manner. Thus fiction and fantasy abound in his works. The same is true of newer Eastern and Western European films, which delight in twisting old dramatic old dramatic forms and inventing new and yet more...
...same tendencies prevent these movements from being popular. The degree of social consciousness of any of their films depends entirely on the sensibility of the director. The film is his personal work; he is responsible to nobody. So much for socialist realism in the New Eastern European Cinema, although sweeping indictments based on what's shown in this country are probably unfair...
...LEAST a third of the Orson Welles' series is the work of New Wave directors (Godard, Varda) or people close to them. Perhaps a third more comes from younger Europeans whose dramatic and visual experiments are still more drastic. In all of them the director designed his film form the beginning to end, which makes watching them a grand revelation. To figure out films designed as a unity gives you a new ability to look for meaning in their dramatic construction and visual style, instead of relying entirely on the dialogue and actors' expressions. The variety of dramatic forms...
...formal awareness is also essential in appreciating the classics of American film. Given broadly standardized plot material, those American directors worthy of the term used dramatic handling and above all visual style to make their films personal expressions. To understand these directors attitudes you have to listen less exclusively to what the dialogue says, and look instead at how the director treats the dialogue and plot he was given. The Orson Welles' series is an especially pleasant and rewarding way to start doing just that...