VIVRE SA VIE, feb 12

VIVRE SA VIE
Jean-Luc Godard



This is Godard's third film. Anna Karina  Godard’s then wife starred as
Nana, a mother and aspiring actress whose poor circumstances lead her to
prostitution. Nana believes she makes this choice of her own free will,
but the film emphasises the social structure that forces the poor into
such situations, and builds to a tragic conclusion.  The film's style,
much like that of "Breathless", boasted the type of experimentation that
made the French New Wave so influential.

Poster by Merryn John Tharakan

Le Rayon Vert, feb 7

LE RAYON VERT
Eric Rohmer



Jules Verne, the early science fiction writer, wrote a book named Le Rayon Vert(the Green Ray, 1882) whose heroine Helena Campbell, is chasing this elusive phenomenon. The heroes are trying to observe the green ray in Scotland. After numerous unsuccessful tries caused by clouds or distant boat sails hiding the sun, the phenomenon is eventually visible, but the heroes, finding love in each other's eyes, don't pay attention to the horizon. According to legend those who see the ray will not choose wrong love.

As her traveling companion cancels two weeks before her holiday, Delphine, a Parisian secretary, is at loose ends. She doesn't want to travel by herself, but has no boyfriend and seems unable to meet new people. A friend takes her to Cherbourg; after a few days there, the weepy and self-pitying Delphine goes back to Paris. She tries the Alps, but returns the same day. Next, it's the beach: once there, she chats with an outgoing Swede, a party girl, and a friendship seems to bud; then, suddenly, Delphine bolts, heading back to Paris. As she waits at the Biarritz train station, a young man catches her eye; perhaps a sunset and the sun's green ray await

For more about the director-->http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Rohmer
and http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/rohmer.html

An interview with Rohmer--> http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/16/rohmer.html

poster by Medha Malhotra

NOSFERATU, feb 5

NOSFERATU
Werner Herzog
1979

"The Nosferatu do not die like the bee when he stings once. He is only stronger... This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men, he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages, ...he can, within his range, direct the elements, the storm, the fog, the thunder, he can command all the meaner things, the rat, and the owl, and the bat, ... and the wolf, ..., and he can at times vanish and come unknown."

-Bram Stoker, 1897

Although the production is technically an adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1987 novel Dracula, the film was actually conceived as a stylistic remake of the 1922 German Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens.

Nosferatu the Vampyre was co-produced by Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, Gaumont and ZDF. As was common for German films during the 1970s, Nosferatu the Vampyre was filmed on a minimal budget, and with a crew of just 16 people. Herzog could not film in Bremen, where the original Murnau film was shot, so he relocated production to Delft, the Netherlands. Parts of the film were shot in nearby Schiedam, after Delft authorities refused to allow Herzog to release 11,000 rats for a scene in the film. Dracula's home is represented by locations in the Czech Republic.

At the request of distributor 20th Century Fox, Herzog produced two versions of the movie simultaneously, to appeal to western audiences. Scenes with dialogue were filmed twice, in German and in English, meaning that the actor's own voices (as opposed to dubbed dialogue by voice actors) could be included in the English version of the film. However, many consider the performances in the German language version to be superior, as Kinski and Ganz could act more confidently in their native language.

Music for the film was performed by the German group Popol Vuh, who have collaborated with Herzog on numerous projects.

About the Director:

Werner Herzog (born Werner Stipetić on September 5, 1942) is a German film director, screenwriter, actor and opera director of Croatian descent.

He is often associated with the German New Wave movement (also called New German Cinema), along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlondorff, Wim Wenders and others. His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams or people with unique talents in obscure fields.

Herzog's films have received considerable critical acclaim and achieved popularity on the art house circuit. They have also been the subject of controversy in regard to their themes and messages, especially the circumstances surrounding their creation. A notable example is Fitzcarraldo, in which the obsessiveness of the central character was mirrored by the director during the making of the film. His treatment of subjects has been characterized as Wagnerian in its scope, as Fitzcarraldo and his later film Invincible (2001) are directly inspired by opera, or operatic themes. He is proud of never using storyboards and often improvising large parts of the script, as he explains on the commentary track to Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Herzog directed five films starring Klaus Kinski, Aguirre: The Wrath of God,Nosferatu, Woyzeck, Fitzcarraldo and Cobra Verde. In 1999 he directed and narrated the documentary film My Best Friend, a retrospective on his often rocky relationship with Kinski.

The official Werner Herzog website: www.wernerherzog.com

poster by Merryn John Tharakan

More about New Wave

Extracts from

791.4303 Hayward, Susan

HAY KEY CONCEPTS IN CINEMA STUDIES

41841

NOUVELLE VAGUE: the French New Wave

1958-1962

New Wave film film makers rejected the cinema of the ‘50s and focussed their attention on the auteur and mise-en-scene. They were not a politicised group.

Their cinema marked a complete rupture with the 1950’s cinematic codes and conventions on both the narrative and visual level.

In terms of narrative there was often no completed or necessarily realistic stories as such, there was no beginning, middle and end- more often it was a slice of lif. There were no “stars”. The time was the ‘now ever-present’ of the ‘60s. Discourses were contemporary and about the people. Taboos around sexuality were destroyed and ‘the couple’ was presented as a complex entity with issues cenering on power relations, lack of communication and questions of identity. This representation of women was more positive, women became more central to the narrative.

Visually, the institutional iconography was deconstructed. The establishing shots which safely orient the spectator in terms of space and time, were excised. A fast editing style, achieved by jump cuts and unmatched shots, replaced the seamless editing style that had prevailed before. The newly lightweight camera abandoned the studios and went out into the streets and suburbs of Paris(the only icon not to disappear). Film stock was fast and cheap. These factors gave this cinema a sense of spontaneity..

1966-1968

The Second Wave was generally more politicised. Bourgeoise myths were denormalised. The consumer boom, nuclear war, Vietnam, student politics, adolescence—all were subjects for treatment. By now, the consumer boom was not about comfort/ a better way of life, but about prostituting the self in order to be better able to consume.

Both New Waves put in place a counter cinema to the standardisation effects of American technology—hand-held camera, no studio, editing practises that drew attention to themselves, no star system.

Although this cinema was criticised for its focus on the individual, it left one very important legacy. Thanks to the huge influx of filmmakers into the industry, production practices had to be reconsidered. For money to be spread around, films had to be low budget. Given the number of filmmakers, the cheaper lightweight camera came into its own. As a result there was a democratisation of the camera. This pioneering effect was to make the camera more accessible to forces formerly marginalised and by 1970s to 1980s women, Blacks and Beurs (an Arab community in France) were entering into filmmaking.

Major figures

Jean-Pierre Melville, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol,

Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, Jacques Demy

NEW GERMAN CINEMA

This was a movement that came into forceful being by the early 1970s although its roots go back to the early 1960s when inspired by the Nouvelle Vague, 26 young filmmakers and film critics signed the Oberhausen Manifesto in 1962. The manifesto declared its intention to create the new German feature film and promised the birth of a new cinema that would be international. This movement was directly politically motivated.

It must be remembered that the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961, effecting the division of Germany into two distinct parts—the capitalist West Germany and the communist East Germany.

New German cinema emanated from West Germany. Unlike films from East Germany, it was a cinema which attempted to come to terms with the nation’s recent past, namely the Nazi era. The motivation of the New German cinema was to give a renewed credibility to the cinematic apparatus and industry after the abuse it had received under the Nazi rule as a propaganda tool.

The new cinema strove for authentic documentary and its style was one of grainy realism.

In economic terms, this new and resisting cinema emerged at the very moment when the industry itself was in decline due to a major drop in audience numbers, thanks to the increased consumption of television sets. German audiences showed very little interest in this new indigenous product. It was left to the French and American audiences to appreciate this new and strongly politicised cinema.

Major figures

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders,

CZECH NEW WAVE

Educated at FAMU, the Czech state film school, previously unknown filmmakers such as Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova, Jiri Menzel, Evald Schorm, and Jan Nemec began to dominate the festival circuit, creating an incredible concentration of films that ran from the politically oppositional to the lyrical to the realist to the surreal. The Czechoslovak filmmakers of the ’60s rejected the official state socialist-realist aesthetic and produced eclectic, technically skillful, and highly assured features that captured the world’s attention and resulted in two Hollywood Oscars for Best Foreign Film (The Shop on Main Street in 1965 and Closely Watched Trains in 1967). The vibrancy and experimentation of the “Czech Film Miracle,” as it is often called, reached something of a peak in the Prague Spring of 1968, when Alexander Dubcek became first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and instituted his policy of “socialism with a human face.” Prague Spring represented the culmination of a period of social and cultural democratization in Czechoslovakia (provoked in no small part by the ingenious and iconoclastic filmmaking of the period) and the liberal policies of the Dubcek regime afforded filmmakers unprecedented artistic freedom. Sadly, Prague Spring and the creativity it fostered came to an abrupt halt in August 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and began the process of “normalization.” The Soviet invasion spelled the end of the Czechoslovak New Wave and the end, or temporary halt, to the careers of many of its finest directors. However, before its premature conclusion in the summer of 1968, the Czechoslovak New Wave produced a throng of daring and enduring films and remains one of the most fertile and original “new waves” in the history of film.

for more on czech new wave

Also found this nice link-->http://www.criterion.com/asp/explore.asp?id=78

February 2008

This month FIN presents New Wave films from France, Germany and Czechoslovakia.
More on New Wave in the next post.

 5  NOSFERATU-Werner Herzog
7  LE RAYON VERTE-Eric Rohmer
12  VIVRE SA VIE-Jean Luc Godard
14  ANTOINE ET COLETTE + BAISERS VOLES-Francois Truffaut
19  THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN-Rainer Werner Fassbinder
20  PARIS,TEXAS-Wim Wenders
21  THE FIREMEN'S BALL-Milos Forman
26  DAISIES-Vera Chytilova
28  CLOSELY OBSERVED TRAINS-Jiri Menzel