European Art Cinema

Cold War Tales

 John Grierson, a British but later Canadian documentary film maker, wrote in 1939 that film was the primary medium for communicating with the public, for disseminating information and for circulating government propaganda. In Germany, Leni Riefenstahl had made Triumph of the Will in 1934. The film was part of the build up to war. In the UK, Humphrey Jennings made Fires were Started to keep up British morale in the blitz in 1943.

European Cinema During WW2

In Italy, a young Roberto Rossellini found opportunities to make propaganda films for the Fascists. His first was The White Ship, celebrating the Italian navy. He learned to use hand-held cameras and how to capture a real-life situation. He filmed, for example, during a naval battle.

 Hollywood films were not seen in Europe during WW2. After the conflict, they flooded in, playing a part in a cultural dimension of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe. Hollywood film, projecting the growing economic success of the United States, played a propaganda role. Indigenous film industries were financially and sometimes physically destroyed.

European Cinema After WW2

One of a number of posters created by the Economic Cooperation Administration, an agency of the U.S. government, to sell the Marshall Plan in Europe. See: http://www.sellingdemocracy.org/

 European filmmakers could not compete with Hollywood. Many did not want to. They wanted to highlight social and class issues. Roberto Rossellini's film 'Rome: Open City (1945) was conceived just months after the Nazis departed Italy and is set in Rome during the occupation. Critics point out that Rossellini uses many melodramatic devices which were not true to the later neo-realist ideals including fictional collaborations between Catholics and communists. Federico Fellini helped write the script. Michaelangelo Antonioni also worked with Rossellini.

First Steps

Eschewing gloss and glamour, Rossellini tells a tale set against the backdrop of extreme conditions. 'Rome, Open City uses natural lighting, handheld camerawork and a cast composed largely of non-actors.

Italian Neo-Realism

The film depicts the head of a family trying to recover from poverty, whose route to work his bicycle, is stolen.

Italian neorealist films deal with the economic and moral conditions of Italy after the war, reflecting the changes in the Italian psyche caused by defeat and the conditions of everyday life, poverty and desperation. Movies were shot on location. Non-professional actors were used. Real-life scenes were depicted without dramatisation. Working people were the main characters. Vittorio De Sica's 'Ladri di biciclette' (1948), 'Bicycle Thieves' is often seen as the first successful neo-realist film.

 French critic Andre Bazin, who would be Neo-Realism's key celebrant, praised The Bicycle Thief's premise as "truly insignificant . . . A workman spends a whole day looking in vain in the streets of Rome for the bicycle someone has stolen from him. If The Bicycle Thief understood Neo-realism as a style, Bazin appreciated it as "pure cinema . . . No more actors, no more story, no more sets . . . the perfect aesthetic illusion of reality.
J. Hoberman, "Wheels of history", The Village Voice; 10/06/98.

Andre Bazin

Bazin co-founded the Paris based magazine 'Cahiers du cinma' in 1951

 Italian Neo-Realism marks the beginning (in the sound era) of art cinema as a viable alternative to popular entertainment films. A market opened in the US for this work when Paramount gave up the block-booking of cinemas. Although at first concerned with social problems and the alienation of modern life, art cinema moves toward an increasingly subjective, personal and even fantastic style.

Art Cinema

Dreams, flashbacks, selfreflexivity, and formal experimentation become very important in the cinema of directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Federico Fellini. His development from Neo-Realist to his own, highly personal style provides a typical development path.
Fellini on set

(David) Bordwell defines art cinema as a mode with ...a set of formal conventions, and implicit viewing procedures." He describes the structuring basis of the art cinema as based on "'objective' realism, 'expressive' or subjective realism, and narrational commentary. He writes that the art cinema relies on a recognizable authorial voice, self-reflexive stylistic choices, causal gaps in the narrative, episodic structure, ambiguity in reading, and a plot which relies on complex psychology.

Who and what are you?

Bordwell argues that art film's goal is to present a complex character for the spectator's consideration. Often, the spectator is invited inside the head of the protagonist through flashbacks, hallucinations or dreams. The art cinema protagonist frequently finds him/herself in great metaphysical crisis and the film's emphasis is on a philosophic struggle. The art cinema stresses a loosening of the chain of cause and effect.
From Framing War: Commemoration, War & the Art Cinema by Lindsay Steenberg

 A group of young critics began to write for Cahiers du Cinma. In 1954, Francois Truffaut criticized stale French Cinema and called it Dads Cinema, or a cinema made by scenarists, in an article called A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema. He called for an auteur strategy, whereby the director of a film, as a work of art, is recognised as the key figure as is a great painter or writer. The critics recognised John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Jean Renoir as auteurs.

Cahiers du cinma

Truffaut and others at 'Cahiers' proposed that the successful director uses the commercial film apparatus the way a writer uses a pen.

The New Wave

Godards Breathless (1959). I had written the first scene and for the rest I had a pile of notes...I said to myself, this is terrible, I stopped everything. Then I thought: in a single day... one should be able to complete about a dozen takes. Only instead of planning ahead I shall invent at the last minute

New Wave directors favoured improvisation and the use of available light, location shooting, direct sound, and vernacular language. They made small-budget films that gave the director complete artistic control, establishing him or her as the auteur of the work. The New Wave developed new stars, such as Jean-Paul Belmondo (b. 1933) and Jeanne Moreau (b. 1928). The women, such as Moreau and Bridgitte Bardot, played embodiments of youthful sensuality, or dark, neurotic intellectuals. (Ideas from 'Key Concepts in Cinema
Studied', by Susan Hayward. Routledge (13 Jun 1996) (Ten copies in LRC)

Techniques
The camera was used not to mesmerize the audience with elaborate narrative and illusory images, but to play with and break away from the common expectations of cinema. The techniques used to shock the audience out of submission and awe were so bold and direct that Jean-Luc Godard has been accused of having contempt for his audience. Godards stylistic approach can be seen as a desperate struggle against the mainstream cinema of the time, or a degrading attack on the viewers naivety. Either way, the challenging awareness represented by this movement remains in cinema today. Effects that now seem either trite or commonplace, such as a character stepping out of her role in order to address the audience directly, were radically innovative at the time.

 According to Peter Wollen, JeanLuc Godard and other New Wave directors were part of a movement of counter-cinema. The techniques of countercinema attempt to create some level of distantiation in the viewer by questioning, subverting and/or openly challenging the basic codes and conventions of classical Hollywood cinema. These would include attacks on the cohesive and linear narrative structure, continuity editing, mise-enscene that perpetuates cinematic realism, cultural stereotypes, etc. (See Godard and Counter-Cinema by Wollen on Studynet)

Counter-Cinema

Distantiation is a concept drawn from Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and connected with the alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt ) theorized and practiced by German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. It may be achieved by such things as obvious jump cuts, glaring lighting, violating the 180 degree rule, etc. The narrative may employ absurd, arbitrary, and/or non-linear story lines. It can be argued that in today's postmodernist cinema, shocking innovation has become part of the standard palette employed by Hollywood directors.

 Fellini was a hugely successful film-maker with two Oscars under his belt, when he began 8 1/2, not long after his 40th birthday. A fictional director no longer knows what film he wishes to make. The main character, Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), is frequently interpreted as an autobiographical figure, suffering a mid-life crisis. Guido's two-week rest cure at the baths is the presumed "real" story of 8 but many features of the film blur the line between reality and dream. The opening scene exemplifies the alienation effect.

Fellinis 8 (1963)

Marcello Mastroianni as Guido. Fellini had previously made 7 films and a short. This was to be film no. 8 . One mans artistic crisis becomes a grand epic of the cinema.

 Temporal perspective is destroyed by characters appearing in 1930s and contemporary dress. Establishing shots are few. Narrative flows between reality, fantasy and flashback. His wife, his colleagues, his work and its savaging by a French critic, the unfinished film, its set and screen tests - all form a uniform barrage of imagery from within and without Guido. His final reconciliation with all the "characters" who "star" in his life is Fellini's remedy of art as salvation. (From '8 1/2: A Film with Itself as Its Subject' By Alexander Sesonke)

A mid-life crisis?

The women Guido knew in Childhood, his nanny, his grandmother and La Saraghina, a prostitute who inhabited an abandoned beachside bunker in his (Fellinis) youth, march freely across the screen.

City Of Women
Federico Fellinis City of Women is a rich work that explores the complex web of projections about women that flow from the male mind. Fellini places the eye of his camera inside the mind of his chauvinistic central character, a man who is obsessed with his own narrow pursuit of the ideal woman, and runs himself ragged in search of her.

"The films of Michelangelo Antonioni are aesthetically complex - critically stimulating though elusive in meaning. They are ambiguous works that pose difficult questions and resist simple conclusions. Classical narrative causalities are dissolved in favour of expressive abstraction. Displaced dramatic action leads to the creation of a stasis occupied by vague feelings, moods and ideas. Confronted with hesitancy, the spectator is compelled to respond imaginatively and independent of the film".
(From http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/ directors/02/antonioni.html)

A Post-Religious Existentialist...

Film historian Virginia Wright Wexman describes Antonioni's perspective on the world as that of a "postreligious Marxist and existentialist intellectual. Like Fellini he built an international reputation.

 The back story of Red Desert is that Giuliana has had a stay in some sort of mental hospital for a nervous breakdown after suffering shock from a car accident. While physically fine, she has found herself estranged from everyone and everything, particularly her own husband who has not understood her and has not been there for her. Shes also estranged from her lover.

Antonionis Red Desert (1964)

In a grim world, the people are as gray as the road, the sky and the buildings with two exceptions. The woman in a bright green coat and her son. She is completely apart from the dreary world around her.

An alien in an alienated world...

Monica Vitti is Giuliana , a modern woman confronted by a spiritually bereft world of shallow relationships and existential angst. In a state of nervous chaos, she moves through the poisoned industrial landscape of Ravenna in northern Italy, which was enjoying an economic miracle.

Techniques

Effects trick the eye: the flattening of space by telephoto lenses; the strange scale, placement, and colour of objects; out of focus foregrounds and backgrounds. He implements a fast, sometimes disorienting, cutting style and emphasises the aural qualities of industry. He uses pastel colours with flowing white smoke and fog. The sound design blends a soundscape of industrial and urban sounds with ghostly ship horns and an electronic music score.

Godards Le Weekend (1967)

Arguably one of the major themes of Le Week End, is that of the breakdown of western society in the midst of a continuing socio-political turmoil, cultural confusion, and the persistent rise of apathy, greed and self-preservation. The film was made just before the May 1968 political upheavals in France and can be seen as somewhat prophetic. The narrative of the film might be linked to a clothesline: it is a necessity for hanging the wash, but what is interesting and important are the garments, linens, etc. that it sustains.

The film predicts the escalation of seemingly pointless and ferocious inner-city violence and the dominance of the automobile as a great destructive force

Middle-Class Apocalpse

In one scene, the couple meet Emily Bront in the forest. She is burnt alive by the impatient couple, when she won't give them directions.

"Le Weekend" is like no other film ever made. Set in a postapocalyptic France in which the automobile is the ultimate symbol of bourgeois decadence and violence...it makes no attempt to adhere to any sort of logic. As historical and fictional characters, ranging from St. Just to Tom Thumb, are dropped into the narrative, the two main characters never ask what they are doing there. More to the point, the two main characters-a vulgar, acquisitive and murderous middle-class husband and wife--never ask what they themselves are doing in such a nightmare.

 There is a complete rejection of realism/illusionism. Narrative is broken and shattered. There are references to the film as a film (introductory captions tell us it is "a film found on the scrapheap" and "film ashtray in the cosmos". The male protagonist complains about the craziness of the movie he's in! Intertitles throughout the film are used as interruptions which are frequently more enigmatic than explanatory. Godard himself says "I am not making these statements, voices in the film are making them"

Shattered narrative

A database of catastrophes

The lack of coherent narrative frees the viewer, making him or her the active explorer of an open-ended network of data, references, statements, and positions. The voices that speak within the film are not structured or "placed" in relation to a dominant discourse; we are not told how we must listen to them. This experimental technique leads to database cinema of more recent times.

 Ingmar Bergman's films usually dealt with existential question of mortality, loneliness, and religious faith. While these themes could seem cerebral, sexual desire found its way to the foreground of most of his movies. His female characters are usually more in touch with their sexuality than the men. In an interview with Playboy in 1964, he said: "...the manifestation of sex is very important, and particularly to me, for above all, I don't want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them."

The Swedish Conjurer

Ingmar Bergman and actress Ingrid Thulin during the production of The Silence (1963)

Bergmans Persona (1966)

in an interview in 2004, Bergman said that he was "depressed" by his own films and could not watch them anymore

Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullman), a famous stage actress recovering from a nervous breakdown, is depicted as preying psychologically on her nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), and Alma herself has a dream late in the film in which she opens a vein in her arm and invites Elisabeth to suck her blood. Alma is figured as the sacrificial lamb of the opening visual poem, while Elisabeth is figured as the vampire.

God for the atheists

Tarkovskys themes often brought him trouble with the Soviet sensors

Andrei Tarkovsky's films are characterised by Christian and metaphysical themes (often in opposition to communist ideology), extremely long takes, and memorable images of exceptional beauty. Recurring motifs are dreams, memory, childhood, running water accompanied by fire, rain indoors, reflections, levitation, and characters reappearing in the foreground of long panning movements of the camera.

Symbols of spirituality

Scene from Stalker

Tarkovsky included levitation scenes into several of his films, most notably Solaris. To him these scenes possess great power and are used for their photogenic value and magical inexplicability. Water, clouds, and reflections were used by him for its surreal beauty and photogenic value, as well as its symbolism, such as waves or the form of brooks or running water. Bells and candles are also frequent symbols. These are symbols of film, sight and sound, and Tarkovsky's film frequently has themes of self reflection. In his theoretical writings he wanted the cinema to act like a church.

Tarkovskys Mirror
Tarkovsky said of Mirror: "There are no entertaining moments in the film. In fact I am categorically against entertainment in cinema it is as degrading for the author as it is for the audience

Tarkovskys Sacrifice (1986)

The one barren tree becomes a porthole into so much more. For Tarkovsky, it symbolised both the beauty of God and the decay of man.

The events or dreams in the film seem to take place in the course of one night. It is Alexander's birthday, and the party includes his hysteria-prone wife and teen-age daughter; two friends - a doctor who has apparently been having an affair with the wife, and a postman who is part intellectual, part mystic, part nut. The gloomy festivities are interrupted by a powerful blast. Thunder rolls; we hear mysterious cries from afar. A voice on the radio speaks of disaster, evidently of nuclear dimensions, and Alexander, who takes mankind's guilt on himself, offers God the sacrifice of all he has if his family can be saved.

Narrative transitivity Identification Transparency Single diegesis Closure Pleasure Fiction

Narrative intransitivity Estrangement Foregrounding Multiple diegesis Aperture Un-pleasure Reality