Word: frenchness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Black Orpheus (Dispatfilm-Gemma; Lopert) is perhaps the most impressive can of film so far cast up on U.S. shores by the New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) of creation that has swept across the French movie industry. It is an amazing creation. The picture was made by Marcel Camus,* a 47-year-old assistant to some of France's top directors. In 1957 he found an adaptation of the Orpheus legend by a Brazilian poet and playwright named Vinicius de Moraes (TIME, Nov. 19, 1956), and for the hell of it he used the wildly poetic mountains around...
Along with most of the arts in France, the cinema spent a long postwar period in the doldrums. But when De Gaulle came to power, his government announced that it did not intend to send good screen subsidies after the same old bad ideas. Reluctantly, French film producers, who are at least as conservative as their Hollywood cousins, agreed to try for something new and different. But would the public like...
They loved it. The Cheaters, a fairly daring film about les blousons noirs (the black jackets, as the French call their juvenile delinquents), was made on the cheap by an oldtimer named Marcel Carne (Children of Paradise), and it became one of the biggest hits of 1958. It was followed by another low-cost smash called The Lovers, directed by Louis Malle, 27. Suddenly, the New Wave was rolling, and on the crest of it dozens of ambitious young cinéastes went surfboarding to success. In the past twelve months, according to the French Film Office, at least...
...French pictures are frankly sexy-probably on the average a little more sexy than the old French pictures. They are also Nouvelle Vaguely romantic in love scenes, which they often shoot through peculiar filters in a tricky way. Much of the camera work, in fact, is too clever-it is hard to see the picture for the pictures...
...French seem to enjoy such youthful excesses, even though many audiences have been disturbed by the curious sense of moral vacuum in many of the pictures. Aside from a general distaste for bourgeois respectability and a slight leaning toward the left, very few of the films express any moral or spiritual convictions whatever. Nevertheless, Les Vaguistes have their principles. They hate commercialism. They prefer to make pictures on subjects of their own choice. They would rather use unknown actors. "They speak of cinema," says one critic, "as of a religion.'' So far, it seems to be a religion...