by Mark Cousins
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Jules et Jim used a range of stylistic jokes and devices including, in this scene, short freeze-frames of Jeanne Moreau’s infectious laugh. Director: François Truffaut. France, 1961.
One crucial fact should be mentioned at this point: the New Wave was not a political movement. Some of its directors were, or became, left-wing, backing the students and union workers in the militant demonstrations in Paris a decade later. Others, like Truffaut, Chabrol and Coutard, were traditionalists, decrying the messy world of social engagement or actively disagreeing with it. Agnès Varda, whose La Pointe Courte (1954) partly heralded the New Wave, belonged to a different group of Parisian filmmakers. Her editor, Alain Resnais, had been drafted in the Second World War and subsequently made a sombre, poetic documentary about the Nazi concentration camps, Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog (1955). Resnais and Varda were more politically committed than the Cahiers filmmakers and more interested in the new complex novels being written in France at the time, but his L’Année Dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad (1961) questioned the nature of film editing as much as Godard’s A bout de souffle. Set in a grand palace, it features a man thinking back to a year earlier when he may or may not have met a woman who may or may not have been with her husband. The first chapters of this book told how filmmakers, such as Ralph Ince (His Last Fight, USA, 1913) found a way of using reverse-angle editing and eye-line matching to clarify who was speaking to whom in a scene, or what they were looking at. L’Année dernière à Marienbad breaks all these rules. For example, on several occasions a character will talk passionately to another yet, when Resnais cuts, to what in Ince’s system would be a reverse angle, to the listener, no one is there. This is disorientating, but is only the first step in the film’s complete undermining of the spatial and temporal logic of editing. Throughout the film, the camera tracks through the grand mansion yet, just when a sense of geography is established, Resnais has rooms connect that surely could not. The same confusion occurs with time. The woman in the film is never sure whether she really met the man a year ago, but neither is it clear where he is, what he is remembering and what he is inventing. Based on a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet, L’Année dernière à Marienbad questioned the very building blocks of narrative cinema as much as Bresson attacked its assumptions about truth and realism.
It was this determination to explode cinema, to shatter schema, that made French filmmakers the most interesting in the world in the early 1960s. Just as Resnais and Godard were re-evaluating editing, the Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer, now working in France, released his follow-up to Ordet (1955) in 1964. Gertrud, Dreyer’s last film, an apparently stagy story about a woman in 1910 who leaves her husband to have an affair, then lives alone (200), was slaughtered by the trendy Parisian critics. In its closing moments, the woman, actress Nina Rode, says, “Look at me. Am I beautiful? No, but I have loved. Look at me. Am I young? No, but I have loved. Look at me. Do I live? No, but I have loved.” These are among the most moving lines in cinema. To film them, Dreyer had his cameraman reflect light directly into the lens. When Dreyer died in 1969, Truffaut wrote, “He has joined Griffith, Stroheim, Murnau, Eisenstein, Lubitsch, the kings of the first generation of cinema. We have much to learn from them and much from Dreyer’s images of whiteness.”3
This extraordinary passion for cinema felt by French filmmakers was not matched by the general public. Attendances dropped thirty-six percent from 420 million in 1957 to 270 million just six years later. Principally it was middle-aged and older people who stopped buying tickets, in part because of television. For example, one channel, ORTF, showed no less than 320 feature films in one year. More commercially minded French directors than Godard, Truffaut or Dreyer tried to counteract this trend by filming in a visual style unlike television. Claude Lelouch, for example, had a huge international success with Un homme et une femme/ A Man and a Woman (1966), a simple love story in itself but a landmark in movie history because it used very long focal length zoom lenses almost throughout. These had been around since the late 1940s and were used by Roberto Rossellini in 1960 but, by pushing them to their extremes and famously turning objects around his actors’ heads into out-of-focus blobs, Lelouch set the visual style for fashionable cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s. The films of Robert Altman, such as McCabe and Mrs Miller (USA, 1971) (201), clearly derive from Un homme et une femme, as do much of the long-lens, widescreen ones of the 1990s, such as those by Michael Mann.
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Dreyer’s Gertrud bucked the fashion for stylistic playfulness, using, instead, a sober visual style to explore a woman’s lifelong search for love. France, 1964.
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The ultra-shallow focus of Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme influenced the photography of films such as Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs Miller. Notice how Julie Christie is pin-sharp but everything around her is blurred, a look that was fashionable throughout much of the 1970s. USA, 1971.
Despite the abrupt changes in 1959, some directors’ innovations actually gained momentum as the decade wore on. Where Lelouch created a bold new visual and romantic style, Jean-Luc Godard’s growing belief in Marxism and even Maoist communism led him to more radical techniques than even A bout de souffle envisaged. In 1967, in an astonishing burst of productivity, he released no less than five films, including the collage-like La Chinoise (France) and Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle/Two or Three Things I Know about Her (France, 1966) with the shot of bubbles in a cup, which was mentioned in the introduction to this book (see page 10). Referring to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and using some of the long-lens techniques popularized by Lelouch, La Chinoise is not so much fictional cinema as a daring mix of conversations, readings, arguments, printed words, captions and slogans. Two years earlier, in 1965, Cahiers du Cinéma had published key documents about Soviet cinema of the 1920s. Godard used some of their editing ideas and confrontational graphics, mixed them with 1960s sexual freedom and created a cine-manifesto. In 1968, young people, rather like those depicted in the film, staged a sit down protest at the Sorbonne. By the end of May, ten million French workers had joined them to demand better wages and working conditions. These events had international impact, especially in the world’s most prolific filmmaking country at the time – America.
TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE AND AMERICA’S NEW WAVE
America, like France, suffered from a decline in cinema attendance in the 1960s, but this did not greatly reduce the takings of the busiest films of the year. Before we get lost in a riot of 1960s innovation, let’s not forget that the top box office grossers throughout the period covered by this chapter were films like Ben-Hur (1959), One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961), Mary Poppins (1964), and The Sound of Music (1965): epics, musicals and cartoons, as in previous decades, and not a jump cut among them. However, beneath this top line, there were signs of change and commitment as fervent as in France. Some of the key figures in the history of American entertainment cinema died in this decade – MGM’s Louis B. Mayer in 1957, Columbia’s Harry Cohn in 1958, Preston Sturges in 1959, Marilyn Monroe in 1962, Stan Laurel, Walt Disney and Buster Keaton in 1966. Technological advances increased the range of films being made. Cameras that shot 16mm film were made lighter and adapted so that they could be held on a cinematographer’s shoulder. A new way of recording sound was invented which did not require the recording machine to be linked umbilically by a cable to the camera. Shoulder-mounted cameras raised the height at which shots were photographed and increased dramatically the range of places from which cameras could film. The sound-recording innovation increased mobility even more by not requiring the sound recordist to be next to the cinematographer while shooting.
Documentaries felt the first impact of these innovations. In 1959, four photographers and filmmakers convinced two US senators running for election that they should allow them to film everything they did in the candid manner of news magazine still photography. The result was the milestone Primary (1960). The filmmakers – Richard Le
acock, Robert Drew, Don Pennebaker and Albert Maysles – became the key North American figures in what soon would be called “Direct Cinema”. A parallel French movement — Cinema Vérité – predated Direct Cinema and had different aims. Whereas the North Americans attempted to record events objectively, as if seen by an inconspicuous “fly on the wall”, as Leacock called it, the French filmmakers – primarily Jean Rouch, but also Michel Brault and Chris Marker – intervened more in what they were filming, sometimes provoking situations to reveal what they saw as the sociological truth – what Rouch called the “privileged moment” – contained within them.
Primary was new in a number of ways. Its filmmakers did not stage scenes as Robert Flaherty had in Nanook of the North (USA, 1921); they followed neither the low-key poetics of Humphrey Jennings nor the fascist operatics of Leni Riefenstahl; they did not do interviews as Harry Watt had done in Housing Problems (UK, 1935); nor did they hide their camera like John Huston in Let There be Light (USA, 1946). What was left? Take a famous scene from Primary, where one of the senators – John F. Kennedy, who would be President in a year – is in a car. Albert Maysles films him there with a new, light 16mm camera. Kennedy gets out, goes in to a meeting, shakes hands, goes up a stairway and on to a stage. The camera follows him the entire way and does not cut. What’s unusual in that, one might ask? Mizoguchi and Ophüls had both used long tracking shots and the open-ing scene in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) did the same thing. However, in these cases the scenes were staged, rehearsed, and filmed on dollies and tracks, in sets or cleared spaces. Drew’s long shot of Kennedy was filmed from the shoulder, in real-life, crowded spaces, following Kennedy wherever he went, regardless of focus or lighting. It would take nearly three decades and the invention of small video cameras before documentary filmmakers expanded further the freedoms exercised in Primary.4
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16mm film stock, minimal lighting and improvisation: John Cassavetes’ distinctive style in Shadows anticipated later American independent filmmaking and was itself derived in part from Direct Cinema documentaries. USA, 1959.
At the same time as Primary, and even more daringly, a thirty-year-old New Yorker of Greek origin, used the same technology for a fiction film. Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959) followed the story of three African-American siblings living in a New York apartment (202). Director Cassavetes shot on 16mm, used few lights, natural sound and improvized scenes. He was influenced both by neo-realism and Brando–Steiger Method acting techniques. Shadows was one of the first films in what would be called “New American Cinema”.
The next trendsetter in New American Cinema’s pared down aesthetic is perhaps a surprising one. The country’s most consistent mainstream innovator, Alfred Hitchcock, kept abreast of the fashions among filmmakers two generations younger than him. At the beginning of the 1960s he abandoned his Freudian quest and colour films, for a black-and-white gothic study in loneliness and serial killing. Hitchcock was too meticulous to adopt the rough and improvisory style of Drew, Maysles or Cassavetes, but in Psycho (1960) he did nothing less than reinvent his already complex career. The veteran director had, perhaps surprisingly, taken to television in 1955, producing, presenting and sometimes directing short macabre dramas. He liked the intimacy and faster working methods of the smaller TV crews, so decided to shoot Psycho in a similar manner. As he said to François Truffaut, “It was an experiment in this sense: Could I make a feature film under the same conditions as a television show?”5 Where conventional Hollywood was aggrandizing, making epics such as Ben-Hur (1959) and Cleopatra (1963), he stripped his work of its gloss, had his lead actress wear ordinary clothes and little make-up and pared down dialogue so that whole sequences had no talking. Psycho’s opening scene, which introduces Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), who is having an affair with Sam Loomis (John Gavin) (203), was more sexually frank than any Hitchcock had filmed before. Again, he explained, “One of the reasons I wanted to do it that way was that the audiences are changing … the straightforward kissing scenes would be looked down at by the younger viewers … they behave as John Gavin and Janet Leigh did.”6 No established director adjusted better to changing times.
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Hitchcock’s new visual minimalism and simplified production design resulted in his most successful film to date, Psycho. USA, 1960.
Hitchcock correctly judged the public taste by shifting to more violent subject matter. A third of the way into Pyscho, Crane, who has stolen money to try to start a new life with her lover, stops at an isolated hotel, is checked in by a nervous young man and, having undergone a crisis of conscience and decided to return the stolen money, is brutally stabbed to death in the shower by what appears to be the young man’s mother (204). In this infamous sequence, a spare and leisurely film suddenly splinters into Eisenstein-ian fragments. Instead of running long lengths of film through the camera, Hitchcock shot short strips, over seven days, from seventy different angles, resulting in just forty-five seconds of footage. Back in 1922, in La Roue (France), Abel Gance had edited film faster than the human eye could perceive it and everyone from Griffith onward had understood that increasing the rate of cutting in a chase sequence or high-drama scene quickens the pulse of the audience. No one before, however, except perhaps Eisenstein himself, had so completely structured a film with this in mind. The film terrified audiences, took twenty times its cost at the box office and established the schema for violent cinema thereafter. Hitchcock was somewhat influenced by the French films of Henri-Georges Clouzot. The former’s mastery of film form in turn provided the model for Truffaut in La Mariée était en noir/The Bride Wore Black (France, 1968). Several whole careers, such as those of directors Claude Chabrol in France and Brian De Palma in America, have been amplifications of Hitchcock’s methods. While the 1960s may in general have been a period when America looked to Europe for cinematic inspiration, the schematic exchange between Hitchcock and French filmmakers shows how two-way such influence can be.
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One of the many trends in cinema in the 1960s was a tendency to increasing violence. The shower scene stabbing in Psycho was a landmark in this regard.
In the early 1960s, a fascinating figure emerged from New York’s art underworld; he gathered together very diverse trends in filmmaking and inflected them in a wholly American way. Andy Warhol, a Cleveland-born artist and then filmmaker, tuned into the mood of 1960s mass culture more than any other artist. At the beginning of the decade he caused a sensation by making silk screen prints of Campbells soup cans and Marilyn Monroe photographs and selling them as contemporary art. No great intellectual, Warhol instinctively connected to the modern design being produced by advertising agencies to attract consumers’ attention. He was not interested in modifying this work, just making a bold picture to capture its brassy seductions. The film world took to Warhol’s art. Dennis Hopper, a bit player from Rebel Without a Cause (USA, 1955) who would later direct Easy Rider (USA, 1969), was the first to buy it in California.
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The ultimate in 1960s minimalism: John Giorno in Andy Warhol’s mammoth, eventless Sleep. USA, 1963.
It was no surprise that Warhol took to cinema in 1963, but what he did with it was, strangely, as radical as Bresson. He stripped it of all of the expressive elements used by directors. His first film, Sleep (1963), comprises static shots of a naked man, Warhol’s lover at the time, sleeping. No lighting, no dialogue, no sound of any sort, no camera moves or story. Filmed with the same type of ultra-basic camera equipment as Primary, the shots are repeated and the whole film runs between six to eight hours. Before making it, Warhol had attended an eighteen-hour and forty-minute music recital which consisted of 840 consecutive performances of a piece of music by Erik Satie. From this he took the idea of hypnotic repetition. The first shot is a close-up of the man’s abdomen, as he breaths in and out (205). This sounds like an empty piece of cine-wallpaper, but it has a strangely human impact. It is neo-realism de-dramatized to the extreme, Bresson minus any attempt
at transformation or spirituality.